Anyway, what I was trying to do is to create some kind of click effect. Ok, let me try again. What I wanted to do, is that when someone clicked on a link, that some kind of circle/rectangle/whatever expanded disappearing. Let’s try with an example. Have you seen those TV ads for games for the Wii? At the beginning there are like three or four circles that disappear. Something like that, but less sophisticate is what I wanted to do.

After trying several things, even after playing with images, I come up with a solution that is quite aproximated, although still needs something extra I don’t know how to do.

• See the click effect in a live demo (demo)
• Download the jQuery plugin jSimulateClick

The example has two interesting parts.

The first part is where the effect is associated to the elements of class ‘clickable-round’. When you click on any ‘clickable-round’ element, a circle will appear and diffuminate:

$('.clickable-round').click (function (event) {
 $(event.currentTarget).jSimulateClick (event.pageX - 1, event.pageY - 1, 'round');
});

The other interesting fragment associated the event to the elements that contain the class ‘clickable-square’. When you click on any of those elements, the effect will be quite similar to the previous one, but instead of drawing a circle, a square that will go from one pixel to the width and height of the clicked object will appear.

$('.clickable-square').click (function (event) {
  $(event.currentTarget).jSimulateClick (event.pageX - 1, event.pageY - 1);
});

If you want to play with the plugin, my advice is that you start playing with the border width, border color, the duration, or even the size of the circle/rectangle…

You can use this javascript for any personal or commercial application, or do whatever you want with it.

Finally, I would appreciate any comment for improving the effect.

Rounding corners is not difficult, in general, the problem is that you should use some “hacks”,  it is not the same rounding corners using a style on a unique DIV, than using 3 DIVS or create a TABLE with background images in order to emulate this effect.

Unfortunately, as the Internet Explorer (even version 6) is still widely used, doing what I’ve explained on the previous post is not a good practice at all.

Anyway, for practical use, as I’ve said before, there are other easy methods to let people see rounded corners no matter its race, gender, religion, operating system or browser. One of this  methods is using javascript libraries for rounding corners easily.  Fortunately, the web is full of javascript libraries, and rounding corners was once an important topic, so let’s see some options:

• Nifty Corners, and the latest version, Nifty Corners Cube: this was the first widely used solution, it received very good reviews by the time
• jQuery corner plugin, created by Dave Methvin: here you could see a demo using all the parameters. After some time this plugin was updated by Mike Alsup who included even more conrer types  (taking a look to this demo to see all available corners).
• JRC is another plugin for jQuery I’ve found on the internet,  following this link you could see a demo
• MochiKit comes with native support for rounded corners as you could see on this example, somehow is very limited but enough for some purposes
• OpenRico also supports rounded corners natively

Finally, if you do not intend to use javascript for rounding corners (because you are looking for something more sofisticated, or you don’t like doing this kind of things by javascript), then take a look at this article about 25 techniques for rounding corners using CSS

Update: I’ve found ShadedBorder which looks great, and I think this is the one I’m going to use.