How to prevent sticky hover effects for buttons on touch devices

Issue

I have created a carousel with a previous and a next button that are always visible. These buttons have a hover state, they turn blue. On touch devices, like iPad, the hover state is sticky, so the button stays blue after tapping it. I don't want that.

• I could add a no-hover class ontouchend for each button, and make my CSS like this: button:not(.no-hover):hover { background-color: blue; } but that's probably quite bad for performance, and doesn't handle devices like the Chromebook Pixel (which has both a touchscreen and a mouse) correctly.

• I could add a touch class to the documentElement and make my CSS like this: html:not(.touch) button:hover { background-color: blue; } But that also doesn't work right on devices with both touch and a mouse.

What I would prefer is removing the hover state ontouchend. But it doesn't seem like that is possible. Focusing another element doesn't remove the hover state. Tapping another element manually does, but I can't seem to trigger that in JavaScript.

All the solutions I have found seem imperfect. Is there a perfect solution?

Solution

You can remove the hover state by temporarily removing the link from the DOM. See http://testbug.handcraft.com/ipad.html

---

In the CSS you have:

:hover {background:red;}

In the JS you have:

function fix()
{
    var el = this;
    var par = el.parentNode;
    var next = el.nextSibling;
    par.removeChild(el);
    setTimeout(function() {par.insertBefore(el, next);}, 0)
}

And then in your HTML you have:

<a href="#" ontouchend="this.onclick=fix">test</a>

Answered By - Sjoerd Visscher