Just like it happened with proposals, the button to select/deselect an
investment wasn't very intuitive; for example, it wasn't obvious that
pressing a button saying "selected" would deselect the investment.
So we're using a switch control, like we do to enable/disable features
since commit fabe97e50.
Note that we're making the text of the switch smaller than in other
places because the text in the investments table it is also smaller
(we're using `font-size: inherit` for that purpose). That made the
button look weird because we were using rems instead of ems for the
width of the button, so we're adjusting that as well.
Also note we're changing the width of the switch to `6em` instead of
`6.25em` (which would be 100px if 1em is 16px). We're doing so because
we used 100 for the minimum width because it's a round number, so
now we're using another round number.
We hadn't added this rule before because there was no such rule in
scss-lint. Instead, we were following it without a linter, and so we
unintentionally broke it sometimes.
But now we're using Stylelint, so we can add the rule and let the linter
check we're still following it.
Until now, overwriting the styles for a certain tenant was a very
tedious task. For example, if we wanted to use a different brand color
for a tenant, we had to manually overwrite the styles for every element
using that color.
It isn't possible to use different SCSS variables per tenant unless we
generate a different stylesheet per tenant. However, doing so would make
the CSS compilation take way too long on installations with more than a
couple of tenants, and it wouldn't allow to get the colors dynamically
from the database, which we intend to support in the future.
So we're using CSS variables instead. These variables are supported by
97% of the browsers (as of October 2022), and for the other 3% of the
browsers we're using the default colors (SCSS variables) instead.
CSS variables have some limitations: for instance, it isn't possible to
use functions like `lighten`, `darken` or `scale-color` with CSS
variables, so the application might behave in a strange way when we use
these functions.
It also isn't possible to automatically get whether black or white text
makes a better contrast with a certain background color. To overcome
this limitation, we're providing variables ending with `-contrast`. For
instance, since the default `$brand` color is a dark one, when assigning
a light color to `--brand`, we probably want to assign
`--brand-contrast: #{$black}` as well, so the text is still readable.
Back in commit 5dbd69486, I said:
> I'm choosing to use the same color for solid and hollow buttons
> because these elements are usually isolated and so from the UX
> perspective they are similar; links, on the other hand, are often in
> the middle of some text.
However, I made a mistake. The crucial factor is that solid buttons
might have a light background if we choose the brand color to be a light
one, and in this case they automatically get black text. However, hollow
buttons always have a light background and so we can't use a light color
for the text and border of these buttons.
The variables `$anchor-color` and `$anchor-color-hover` are the ones
Foundation uses internally; by using them, we make sure every link will
use the colors we define.
Now we can simplify the default styles for the `<a>` tags, since by
default they already use these variables.
We were defining (for instance) white text against the `$brand`
background. That meant that, if somebody customized the `$brand` color
so it used a light color, they had to customize the text color as well
in order to guarantee proper contrast between text and background
colors.
So we're using `color-pick-contrast` instead, which means we don't have
to manually calculate whether white or black will be the color which
makes the text more readable.
Should hollow buttons use the same color as links do or the same color
as solid buttons do? In the default scenario, it doesn't matter, since
links and solid buttons use the same color. However, it matters when
people customize the application so links and solid buttons don't use
the same color.
I'm choosing to use the same color for solid and hollow buttons because
these elements are usually isolated and so from the UX perspective they
are similar; links, on the other hand, are often in the middle of some
text.
Note we're talking about links and buttons while many of the "buttons"
we use in the application are actually links styled as buttons. Here,
"buttons" means "things that look like buttons".
We were using buttons with the "Enable" and "Disable" texts to
enable/disable settings. However, when machine learning settings were
introduced in commit 4d27bbeba, a switch control was introduced to
enable/disable them.
In order to keep the interface consistent, we're now using switch
controls in other sections where settings are enabled/disabled. We can
even use the same code in the machine learning settings as well.
We're also removing the confirmation dialog to enable/disable a setting,
since the dialog is really annoying when changing several settings and
this action can be undone immediately. The only setting which might need
a confirmation is the "Skip user verification" one; we might add it in
the future. Removing the confirmation here doesn't make things worse,
though; the "Are you sure?" confirmation dialog was also pretty useless
and users would most likely blindly accept it.
Note Capybara doesn't support finding a button by its `aria-labelledby`
atrribute. Ideally we'd write `click_button "Participatory budgeting"`
instead of `click_button "Yes"`, since from the user's point of view the
"Yes" or "No" texts aren't button labels but indicators of the status of
the setting. This makes the code a little brittle since tests would pass
even if the element referenced by `aria-labelledby` didn't exist.
We were using a focus outline on links, but weren't doing the same for
buttons. Since sometimes browsers use a default outline which is barely
visible, this was very disorienting when browsing using the keyboard; we
were navigating through links that clearly indicated where the keyboard
focus was, and when reaching a button suddenly we had this almost
imperceptible feedback. Even if I'm used to it, my first reaction is
always "where did the focus go?" until I realize it's now on a button.
This is even more confusing because we've got buttons looking like links
and links looking like buttons.
Note that in the rules for the `:focus` styles we're including buttons
and the `[type="button"]` attribute. This seems redundant since those
styles are already covered by the `button` selector. However, Foundation
adds styles to buttons with the `[type]` attribute. Since the attribute
selector has precedence over the tag selector, we need to use the
attribute selector as well in order to override Foundation's styles.
Using the placeholder selector, we weren't overwriting the rules in the
mixin called with `@include` in some cases because in the generated CSS
the placeholder selector appeared before the code generated by the calls
to `@include`.
Since we were defining the selection to have the same text color and
background color as the element they were in, it resulted in the
selection being invisible.
It wasn't that noticeable because we were using this color combination
mainly in links and buttons, and selecting their text is not as common.
But we plan to use the `$brand` color on budget headers as well, and
this issue is more obvious there.
Browsers like Chrome weren't that affected because they automatically
make the selection semi-transparent and so the selected text still had a
slightly different color. In order to prevent this effect when the
selection is white, we're using a 0.99 opacity (in this case Chrome
ignores numbers higher that 0.998).
One file was OK when we only had a couple of mixins, but recently we've
been adding quite a few.
We can now avoid a SCSS Lint warning by excluding just the file with the
affected mixin.
