Learning jQuery

As some of you have heard, there have been two new methods added in jQuery 1.4.2, .delegate() and .undelegate(). These methods achieve the same thing as the .live() and .die() methods, they just use a different syntax. For those new to .live(), it’s a method in jQuery that allows you to attach events to elements that appear in the document as well as elements that will appear in the future. An example would be if you attached a click event via .live():

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In my Jan Aagaard asked how we might go about enhancing the script by adding a small delay before showing a tooltip. The answer lies with two JavaScript functions, setTimeout() and clearTimeout().

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Last time I showed how to use event delegation to create a simple tooltip for a huge number of elements without running into the problem of binding an event handler to all of those elements. In this tutorial, I’m going to refine that tooltip script a bit, avoiding some code repetition and fixing a bug that someone pointed out in a comment.

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There are many, many jQuery tooltip plugins out there, and some of them are very good. But when someone on the jQuery Google Group asked (a year ago) which plugin could handle displaying tooltips for 2,000 links on a page, I wasn’t able to find one. So, I decided to throw together a quick little plugin myself and was surprised by how easy it was.

Event Delegation, Again

The key to having JavaScript handle hundreds, or even thousands, of elements on a page is to use event delegation. As Louis-Rémi Babé described in Working with Events, Part 3: More Event Delegation with jQuery, jQuery’s .live() method makes event delegation dead easy. A simple tooltip script using .live() might look something like this:

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Event delegation, as described in the first article of this series, is a way to take advantage
of event bubbling to avoid binding an event listener more than once. jQuery 1.3 and the upcoming jQuery 1.4
have many features that make using event delegation in your web pages easier.
The aim of this tutorial is to help you understand how these new features work. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone sent me an email the other day, asking that I add shorthand methods for .unbind(eventType) to the jQuery core file. He argued that since jQuery provides shorthands such as .click() for .bind('click'), it should also include .unclick() for .unbind('click') for consistency. But he didn’t consider two things:

1. I can’t change jQuery’s API.
2. Those shorthand methods used to be part of jQuery core, but with the release of 1.0, John Resig cleaned up the API quite a bit, removing all of the .unEvent() and .oneEvent() methods.

While I understand the desire for simplicity in developers’ code and consistency in jQuery’s API, I think Mr. Resig made the right decision removing the shorthand methods. Keeping both “un” and “one” shorthands in there would have meant an additional 44 methods, with very little gain for most users of the library. Nevertheless, it’s fairly trivial to create a plugin for this sort of thing.

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