How to prevent sticky hover effects for buttons on touch devices

Question

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?

Answer 1

Once CSS Media Queries Level 4 is implemented, you'll be able to do this:

@media (hover: hover) {
    button:hover {
        background-color: blue;
    }
}

Or in English: "If the browser supports proper/true/real/non-emulated hovering (e.g. has a mouse-like primary input device), then apply this style when buttons are hovered over."

Since this part of Media Queries Level 4 has so far only been implemented in bleeding-edge Chrome, I wrote a polyfill to deal with this. Using it, you can transform the above futuristic CSS into:

html.my-true-hover button:hover {
    background-color: blue;
}

(A variation on the .no-touch technique) And then using some client-side JavaScript from the same polyfill that detects support for hovering, you can toggle the presence of the my-true-hover class accordingly:

$(document).on('mq4hsChange', function (e) {
    $(document.documentElement).toggleClass('my-true-hover', e.trueHover);
});