Question

Bottom line: I’d like to disable (with jQuery) certain elements from being able to take focus, as opposed to removing focus that’s already applied. My issue may be IE-8 specific, so I’ll consider IE-8 focussed solutions.

For example, I have a months-nav for which sometimes some months may not be valid selections, but I want to still present the month. Rather than cluttering my server-side logic and complicating my markup by switching to a span instead of a link for the invalid month, I’m just adding an “invalid” class to the li (link container)

<li class="valid">
    <a href="/subpubs/yearMonth/2011-1">Jan</a>
</li>       

<li class="invalid">
    <a href="/subpubs/yearMonth/2011-2">Feb</a>
</li>

[etc.]

This jQuery works to turn off the link and remove focus:

$('.invalid  > a').click(function () { $(this).blur(); return false; });

But in IE8 (though not IE7, don’t know about IE9), the removal of focus by .blur() has enough of a delay that there’s a visible blink (even with lonesomeday’s solution). So I’d like another approach, or perhaps just a fix for IE8.

Is there away to just disable the link from being able to take focus at all?

Answer 1

You could consider switching all the invalid links to span markup using jQuery; this would be client-side rather than server-side. Is there a particular reason for removing the focus from these links? If they don’t actually link to anything useful surely this is a case where server-side you should be replacing the links with just text?