Question

I have a javasccript function that shows or hides “spans” when I click an input to show hints when a user fills out forms:

function prepareInputsForHints() {
var inputs = document.getElementsByTagName("input");

for (var i=0; i<inputs.length; i++){
    // test to see if the hint span exists first
    if (inputs[i].parentNode.getElementsByTagName("span")[0]) {
        // the span exists!  on focus, show the hint
        inputs[i].onfocus = function () {
            this.parentNode.getElementsByTagName("span")[0].style.display = "inline";
        }
        // when the cursor moves away from the field, hide the hint
        inputs[i].onblur = function () {
            this.parentNode.getElementsByTagName("span")[0].style.display = "none";
        }
    }
}
}

My problem is that when I try to add a link to the hints text, the user cannot click it because it registers first with the onblur event and the hint dissapears, so I would like to know how to modify this function so that it does not hide when I click the hint.

Answer 1

You can use a boolean var to test if the user is with mouse over your hint, then if onblur and not mouseOver you hide your hint.

Something like this inside your loop:

var inputs = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
for (var i=0; i<inputs.length; i++){
    (function(i) {
        // Let the code cleaner :)
        var span = inputs[i].nextElementSibling;

        span.onmouseover = function() { this.isOver = true; }
        span.onmouseout = function() { this.isOver = false; if(!inputs[i].isFocus) inputs[i].onblur(); }

        // the span exists!  on focus, show the hint
        inputs[i].onfocus = function () {
            this.isFocus = true;
            span.style.display = "inline";
        }
        // when the cursor moves away from the field, hide the hint
        inputs[i].onblur = function () {
            this.isFocus = false;
            if(!span.isOver) span.style.display = "none";
        }
    })(i);
}

I put a self executing function just to keep the var i scope, you don’t have troubles onmouseout function.

EDIT: Updated the example

Your code for get the next span will not work, so I changed to nextElementSibling, because the example you put in the jsfiddler.