Christian Heilmann

The devil is in the details…

Tuesday, April 5th, 2022 at 12:22 pm

It is not that hard to create a script that shows and hides parts of the document, but often we forget about how our visitors use the products we build. Especially when it comes to navigating huge documents, people tend to use the “find in page” functionality of browsers. And when they do and we hid content with JavaScript, browsers would either not find the content or users won’t know where in the document it is.

If you use the HTML elements of summary and details you don’t have to write any show/hide code yourself and users of Chromium browsers (Edge, Chrome, Brave…) can use “find in page” as the browser will automatically expand the details that contain their search terms.

Here’s a quick video showing that on The VS Code YouTube channel and on TikTok .

You can see this in action on any page that uses the elements. For example on this W3C document you can open the Developer Tools and see the browser add the “open” attribute to the detail in question when the term was found inside the details.

Animation of the browser automatically opening a section when a search term was found inside it.

More about summary and details:

Share on Mastodon (needs instance)

Share on BlueSky

Newsletter

Check out the Dev Digest Newsletter I write every week for WeAreDevelopers. Latest issues:

160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
158: 🕹️ Super Mario AI 🔑 API keys in LLMs 🤙🏾 Vibe Coding Why is AI playing Super Mario? How is hallucinating the least of our worries and what are rules for developing Safety Critical Code?
157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

My other work: