Super Simple Swipe Sections

Yesteryear we used tabs in UI. The problem with tabs and similar navigation aides is that they demand pixels to tell users about where they might go, whereas, good Windows 8 design tells users about where they are.

If you’re on a page that shows multiple entities or sections or parts or whatever, just hint to the user that there’s more off the page by giving yourself a left margin but cutting content off on the right.

I made a pretty simple way to do this for a Windows 8 app and you’re free to steal it.

Just add this to your default.css…

/*Swipers*/
.swiper {
    width:100%;
    display: -ms-flexbox;
    -ms-scroll-snap-x: mandatory snapInterval(0%, 80%);
    overflow-x: scroll;
    overflow-y: hidden;
}

.swiper > * {
    box-sizing: border-box;
    width: 80%;
    padding-right:80px;
}

    .swiper > * > h2 {
        margin-bottom: 20px;
    }

Then add class=”swiper” to the main section on your page (the one that has a role of main)…

<section aria-label="Main content" role="main" class="swiper">
    ...
</section>

You might want to give you main section the standard 120 pixel left margin like this…

.myPage section[role=main] {
    margin-left: 120px;
}

Then give it contents something like this…

<section aria-label="Main content" role="main" class="swiper">
    <div>
        <h2>Section One</h2>
        ...
    </div>
    <div>
        <h2>Section Two</h2>
        ...
    </div>
    <div>
        <h2>Section Three</h2>
        ...
    </div>
    <div></div>
</section>

Notice a few things…

• the swiper’s immediate children can be any type of element (*). I’m using divs in my example.
• the children will be 80% and have 80% snappoint intervals. This is so that the content from the next page will show up on screen and hint to the user to swipe and see more
• there is an extra <div></div> at the end. This is necessary for being able to snap to the last section with a swipe gesture
• each section has a header (h2) and it will automatically have the correct 20 pixels under it

That’s it. I hope it comes in useful to you.

Copyright (c) Microsoft. All rights reserved. The code provided in this post is licensed under the MS-Limited Public License