Learning jQuery

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 »

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!

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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?

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A week or so ago, someone posted a comment on one of my previous articles, asking if I could help her split up the textual content of an element, showing the first part and replacing the second with a link that, when clicked, would reveal the text. This behavior would appear in an FAQ using a definition list (<dl>), with each question contained in a <dt> and each answer contained in a <dd>. I soon realized that the solution would be rather involved, so I decided to create a new entry out of it rather than simply answer her question in another comment.

Here is the simple definition list structure that I’ll be using for the example:

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After posting the last entry on animated scrolling with jQuery 1.2, I realized that I had left out an important piece of code. Actually, I didn't discover it until someone notified me that another page on the site was broken. Can you spot the problem(s)? [Note: the problem is not in line 3. The syntax highlighter just can't handle the regular expression with two slashes in it ("//") and is incorrectly treating them as a comment mark.] See the answer below the code.

It's been so long since I last posted a tutorial here that I'm afraid everyone might have forgotten about the place. For the past few months, there has been a little "Page Contents" menu at the top-right corner of some of the pages on this site — actually, any page that has more than one <h2> elements in the main content area. In this entry, I'd like to demonstrate how to create an automatic page contents list using jQuery.