Google's Imageless Buttons

Question

There have been a few articles recently about Google's new imageless buttons:

• http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/02/04/recreating-the-button.html
• http://stopdesign.com/eg/buttons/3.0/code.html
• http://stopdesign.com/eg/buttons/3.1/code.html
• http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-ways-to-label-with-move-to-and-auto.html

I really like how these new buttons work in Gmail. How can I use these or similar buttons on my site? Are there any open source projects with a similar look & feel?

If I wanted to roll my own button package like this using JQuery/XHTML/CSS, what elements could I use? My initial thoughts are:

1. Standard <input type="button"> with css to improve the look (the design article talked mostly about the css/imges involves.)

2. Jquery javascript to bring up a custom dialog rooted to the button on the "onclick" event which would have <a> tags in them and a search bar for filtering? Would a table layout for that popup be sane?

I'm terrible at reverse engineering things on the web, what are some of the tools that I could use to help reverse engineer these buttons? Using Firefox's web developer toolbar I can't really see the css or javascript (even if it is minified) that is used on the buttons popup dialogs. What browser tool or other method could I use to peek at them and get some ideas?

I'm not looking to steal any of Google's IP, just get an idea of how I could create similar button functionality.

Answer 1

-- EDIT -- I didn't see the link in the original post. Sorry! Will try and re-write to reflect actual question

StopDesign has an excellent post on this here. [edit 20091107] These were released as part of the closure library: see the button demo.

Basically the custom buttons he shows are created using a simple bit of CSS.

He originally used 9 tables to get the effect:

But later he used a simple 1px left and right margin on the top and bottom borders to achieve the same effect.

The gradient is faked by using three layers:

All of the code can be found at the Custom Buttons 3.1 page. (although the gradient without the image is only working in Firefox and Safari)

Step by Step Instructions

1 - Insert the following CSS:

/* Start custom button CSS here
---------------------------------------- */
.btn {
  display:inline-block;
  background:none;
  margin:0;
  padding:3px 0;
  border-width:0;
  overflow:visible;
  font:100%/1.2 Arial,Sans-serif;
  text-decoration:none;
  color:#333;
  }
* html button.btn {
  padding-bottom:1px;
  }
/* Immediately below is a temporary hack to serve the 
   following margin values only to Gecko browsers
   Gecko browsers add an extra 3px of left/right 
   padding to button elements which can't be overriden.
   Thus, we use -3px of left/right margin to overcome this. */
html:not([lang*=""]) button.btn {
  margin:0 -3px;
  }
.btn span {
  background:#f9f9f9;
  z-index:1;
  margin:0;
  padding:3px 0;
  border-left:1px solid #ccc;
  border-right:1px solid #bbb;
  }
* html .btn span {
  padding-top:0;
  }
.btn span span {
  background:none;
  position:relative;
  padding:3px .4em;
  border-width:0;
  border-top:1px solid #ccc;
  border-bottom:1px solid #bbb;
  }
.btn b {
  background:#e3e3e3;
  position:absolute;
  z-index:2;
  bottom:0;
  left:0;
  width:100%;
  overflow:hidden;
  height:40%;
  border-top:3px solid #eee;
  }
* html .btn b {
  top:1px;
  }
.btn u {
  text-decoration:none;
  position:relative;
  z-index:3;
  }

/* pill classes only needed if using pill style buttons ( LEFT | CENTER | RIGHT ) */
button.pill-l span {
  border-right-width:0;
  }
button.pill-l span span {
  border-right:1px solid #ccc;
  }
button.pill-c span {
  border-right-style:none;
  border-left-color:#fff;
  }
button.pill-c span span {
  border-right:1px solid #ccc;
  }
button.pill-r span {
  border-left-color:#fff;
  }

/* only needed if implementing separate hover state for buttons */
.btn:hover span, .btn:hover span span {
  cursor:pointer;
  border-color:#9cf !important;
  color:#000;
  }

/* use if one button should be the 'primary' button */
.primary {
  font-weight:bold;
  color:#000;
  }

2 - Use one of the following ways to call it (more can be found in the links above)

<a href="#" class="btn"><span><span><b>&nbsp;</b><u>button</u></span></span></a>

or

<button type="button" class="btn"><span><span><b>&nbsp;</b><u>button</u></span></span></button>