Learning jQuery

If you haven’t poked around under the hood of jQuery, you might not be aware that when you pass the jQuery function an expression or DOM element it places these elements (or, possibly a single element) into an object, and then this object is returned so that it can be chained. Without getting into the details of chaining, the fundamental concept to remember is this:

Most jQuery methods return the jQuery object itself, which allows methods to be chained.
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Somebody on the jQuery Google Group asked the other day about toggling a checkbox within a table row when the user clicked anywhere within the row. This can be a nice feature to have, and it’s also very straightforward to implement. Read the rest of this entry »

This tutorial describes a way to avoid a flash of unstyled content that sometimes occurs when applying styles with JavaScript on page load. The problem is most evident when there is some content that needs to be hidden initially and when the document is large or complex. We can see an example of the problem on this test page.

The page is a copy of a previous entry on this blog with over 140 comments—quite a lot of content. Look for the bright yellow background before the page finishes loading. That's the part that is supposed to be hidden from the start — a simple unordered list, <ul id="flash">.

In pages with a more reasonable length, the standard jQuery code would work just fine:

But in this page there is a whole lot of document that has to be ready before anything inside the $(document).ready() function can be executed. Too much, in fact. And putting the <script> tags just inside the closing </body> tag doesn't help either. No, using JavaScript to hide elements like this just won't work unless the scripts are placed in the HTML immediately following the elements they're hiding.
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A common feature I've seen on “web 2.0” sites and wikis is the "external link" icon: . While I'm not crazy about the idea of sticking these little images all over the HTML, they're a great candidate for using progressive enhancement. In our case, we can use jQuery to add the images pretty easily.
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A few months ago I threw together a quick redesign of the Learning jQuery site. It's nothing fancy, mind you, but I was itching to retire the thin veil covering the tired old WordPress Kubrick theme, so something had to be done.

Almost immediately upon changing the font-family and font-size of the blog post titles, I noticed a few unsightly widows (just to clarify, we're talking about typographical widows. My mother already suspects me of avoiding her; I don't want to add to her anxiety. ).

Here is an example of one such widow: Read the rest of this entry »

After many months of stellar work, the jQuery UI team has released version 1.5 of their flagship suite of user-interface widgets, components, and effects. This release was focused on bringing you a standardized development API across all of the components, allowing for a more seamless experience when working with the jQuery UI library. Read the rest of this entry »