Hoping one of you CSS whizzes can help me out here. I would like to know if there is a way to add more advanced link effects without the use of Flash, such as rippling or energy bolt movement as a hover effect. I know I could make them animated gifs, but I need the links to continue to be text. Is it possible or no? Any other fancy hover tricks that can be accomplished through stylesheet alone?
Anything that changes using timing of any sort requires scripting. I'm not sure if you could get away with a thunderbolt on a link... I guess it's possible. You might want to check out CSS tooltips, where in your case the tooltip is an animated gif. It can sit in the anchor's absolutely positioned child element (a span is most commonly used) which stays offscreen (using left: -abazillionunits) until hovered or focussed over, wherewhich the span or whatever moves onscreen and shows its thing. I think Stu Nichols did something similar with hovering over something made a movie run (animated gif). For something to look good AND fancy it might have to be a rather large file. You could also keep the span always over the anchor showing an image of the text (those without images like the blind and the dial-uppers can still see the text just fine and so long as CSS is enabled (which is most of the time) they won't know there's a span at all) and then you can have a neat effect happen on :hover or :focus and it can look smoother than going from plain text to animated image. Here's some ideas for you: http://stommepoes.nl/Menus/maphover.html just some image replacement http://pmob.co.uk/pob/disjointed1.htm Paul's page... he has one that mentions Opera's bug with trying this with inline text, but I don't see it on this page... but there's a problem with Opera, only when your hovery thing is inline. Stu's first page (there are links to the others on there too): http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/streaker.html I have been able to successfully imitate that except I haven't been able to deal with the mouse as well as he does. I can make the cursor vanish only in FF, while Safari still shows a small dot and the others just show the arrow. Bleh. You could start with an ok CSS hover thingie going on, and then enhance it a bit with Javascript for those visitors who have it. I'm guessing the prettiest stuff comes from the otherwise brainless MooTools (see-through hovers, fades, blah) which if there's a well-enough written script, you could incorporate it into an existing, text-based page. I say this cause one issue with animated gifs is you can't start or stop them in their animation cycle, so having an image do something from left to right... might first show up in the middle or the right side before it cycles over to the beginning again. Even when they're offscreen, they're spinning : ) Hope this helps. : )