Learning jQuery

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.
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 »

In my last article, I described the common problem of events seemingly ceasing to work for new elements added to a document, whether by some form of ajax or by DOM modification. We examined one way to overcome the problem: Event Delegation. With event delegation, we bind the event handler to a containing element that remains in the DOM and then check for the target of the event.

Cloning Nodes

This time, we’ll take a look at re-binding event handlers. But before we do, I should mention that, as of jQuery version 1.2, event handlers can be cloned along with elements. Consider this unordered list: Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I have been getting a real buzz out of developing with jQuery. I’ve been using the library since 2006, releasing sporadic bits of code. In April of this year, I released the third revision of my most complex plugin, jMaps, and updated several other plugins, which are available in my mercurial repository.

This was also the same month I discovered a new plugin which has dramatically changed how I develop applications with jQuery. The plugin in question is Dan Webb’s Low Pro for jQuery, a port of the plugin of the same name for Prototype.

What is Low Pro?

So what is Low Pro? It’s a plugin that provides a way of making more object-oriented JavaScript through event delegation. jQuery’s plugin architecture provides a really simple way of extending the core functionality, but there is no easy way of making macros of code that do several types of events on one element. Until now!
Read the rest of this entry »

CSS and JavaScript are different in many ways, almost all of which are too obvious to mention. However, one difference between the two bears explanation, because it is often the cause of confusion and consternation, especially among those who are making the transition from CSS guru to jQuery novice. In fact, it was one of the first things I asked about on the jQuery mailing list back in 2006. Since then, I’ve seen at least one question on the subject every week, and sometimes as many as one per day—despite an FAQ page and these three plugins to help users deal with it.

How CSS and JavaScript Are Different

So, what’s this important difference?
Read the rest of this entry »

jQuery has a nice selection of core animation effects, such as .show('speed') and .hide('speed'), .slideUp() and .slideDown(), and .fadeIn() and .fadeOut(). It even has a couple methods for toggling effects — the aptly named .toggle('speed') and .slideToggle().

All of these methods have optional speed, easing, and callback arguments — although a couple are special cases. The .show() and .hide() methods, when used without a speed, will immediately show and hide the matched set of elements with no animation. When the speed argument is included, the matched elements are shown and hidden gradually by animating their height, width, and opacity simultaneously. The .toggle() method shares its name with a method that takes two arguments that alternate being triggered. All of the other effect methods have a default speed of 400ms.
Read the rest of this entry »