Clicking on buttons through a container mask

Question

I have a container with some clickable items, and at the bottom of the container, there is a gradient that I'm adding with .container:after to create a fade effect. I would still like the items at the bottom to be clickable, but also to be affected by the fade, so putting the fade behind the clickable items won't work.

http://jsfiddle.net/mwjj7hff/1/

HTML:

<div class="container">
    <ul>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
        <li>Item</li>
    </ul>
</div>

CSS:

.container {
    border: 1px solid #ccc;
    font-family: sans-serif;
    height: 400px;
    overflow: hidden;
    position: relative;
    width: 200px;
}

.container:after {
    background: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(255, 255, 255, .3) 0%, white 100%);
    bottom: 0;
    content: " ";
    height: 150px;
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    width: 100%;
}

ul {
    list-style-type: none;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

li {
    cursor: pointer;
    margin: 3px;
    padding: 3px;
    text-align: center;
}

li:hover {
   background: #99d; 
}

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

A quick, easy solution would be to add pointer-events: none to the pseudo-element.

In doing so, you can essentially click through it:

MDN - pointer-events: none

The element is never the target of mouse events; however, mouse events may target its descendant elements if those descendants have pointer-events set to some other value. In these circumstances, mouse events will trigger event listeners on this parent element as appropriate on their way to/from the descendant during the event capture/bubble phases.

Updated Example

.container:after {
    background: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(255, 255, 255, .3) 0%, white 100%);
    bottom: 0;
    content: " ";
    height: 150px;
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    width: 100%;
    pointer-events: none;
}

Browser support for pointer-events can be found here - currently 87.29%.

Thanks! If there's a solution that includes IE9/10, that would be better, but this works very well! — MattDiamant, Mar 25 '15 at 21:00

Clicking on buttons through a container mask

1 Answers1