Alan Hogan

Things Alan Hogan feels like sharing.

These are my comments on music, movies, books, web development and programming, Mac tips, and life in general. Enjoy!

Wed Oct 13

tel: with fallback

I think it’s nice to support the tel: protocol when possible. But in a lot of (especially desktop) browsers, nothing will happen.

Here’s a thought: In theory, if you handled the click event on the immediate parent of the tel link, wouldn’t you only get the click event if the browser did not correctly use the protocol when the user clicked the tel link? You could display the number, prompt to download a vCard, or whatever.

The motivation, of course is this: If the tel link doesn’t look clickable, that’s a (small) problem because people may not click it, instead wasting time copying it. But if it *does_ look clickable, and a desktop user clicks it to no effect, it will seem broken to that user.

I haven’t tried this, so take it with a grain of salt.