X-Reflection: HTML5 Web Component for Adding CSS3 Reflections to any Element

HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript

The Fine Art of Web Development by Martin Ivanov

For better or worse WebKit’s -webkit-box-reflect and Mozilla’s -moz-element never made it to the official specification of CSS3, although the latter may come pretty useful and has a lot of potential applications. Personally I am not a fan of reflections and they remind me of the mid 90’s water reflection Java applets but I guess that’s because I am not a designer. Nevertheless, I thought that a custom tag (along with the lazy image loader and x-meme) doing this automatically to all of the HTML elements added into it may come useful, so I implemented AcidJs-X-Reflect, which works like that:

[sourcecode language=”html”]
<acidjs-xreflect>
    <img src="path/to/image-01.jpg" height="233" width="310" />
</acidjs-xreflect>
<acidjs-xreflect scale=".5" opacity=".75" endcolor="#b00">
    <img src="path/to/image-02.jpg" height="233" width="310" />
</acidjs-xreflect>
<acidjs-xreflect scale="2" opacity=".75" endcolor="#00f">
    <img src="path/to/image-03.jpg" height="233" width="310" />
    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…</p>
</acidjs-xreflect>
[/sourcecode]

Once the component kicks in, any element inside of it is supplied with a configurable (scale, end color, opacity) reflection:

x-refelct-image-01x-refelct-image-02

The reflection is achieved by duplicating the original content in a separate flipped (scaleY(-1)) tag overlayed by a semi-transparent element with gradient. Initially utilized CSS generated content (::after) for the gradient overlay however I noticed that since the effect is applied with JavaScript (all of the properties of the reflection are configurable) the gradient randomly disappeared in Firefox, so eventually I went for a nested <div />. I also gave up the idea of using scoped styles, since they are not widely supported yet.

HTML Attributes of the Tag

Any native HTML attribute (id, class, data-*, style, etc.) is supported, plus the component-specific:

Methods, Getters and Setters

Any native JavaScript method (document.getElementById, document.querySelector, element.setAttribute, element.removeAttribute etc. No component-specific methods, getters or setters.

Check the demo on this page. You will also find a download link there. If you share the same interest towards HTML5 Web Components as I do these days, make sure you read my relevant blog posts and further endeavors on my HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript Experiments and Insight website.

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