:hover on table rows

No!

Change the tr under what circumstance, have you got any conditions that change that can produce a new class somewhere or body tag?

Cant think of a means to make a tr clickable, a tr is just a holder for cells.

With the web apps that I develop, I often end up displaying complex tabulated data (not just simple lists) whereby each table row is logically linked to a database record that the user might want to see in more detail. Making one or more of the items of data into a clickable link is fine to a point, but the traditional effect of having the entire row a clickable link with a hover effect to aid usability is much more, well, 'usable'.

One solution is to make every item of data in the row into a link and then to set 'display' to 'block' and use :hover to change the background colour. But not only does that require a huge amount of extra mark-up, you also end up with just cell highlighting instead of row highlighting.

As much as I dislike using JavaScript for navigation, in this case it is not for a public website and the end (increased usability) justifies the means in my opinion:

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As there are a few CSS experts out there frequently coming up with new solutions to old problems, I just wanted to check that this particular problem is still best solved with JavaScript.

IE aside. :hover will work for a TR. IE will play ball with whatever:hover. Clicking to display something else is really only feasible with javascript. The :focus tricks could work, but that would mean you would need to attach the extra content to every item on the row, as I don't think TR can receive focus.

Clicking to load another page requires an anchor or javascript. Its not something CSS can ever do.

In Firefox, any element with a tab index ≥0 can have focus.

cheers,

gary