Learning jQuery

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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Someone on the jQuery Google Group yesterday asked about how to display a border around elements on hover. Here is a quick script I wrote to achieve that effect:

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Most if not all of the jQuery plugins out there have some level of customization. But very few of the plugin authors have mastered the very particular art involved.

Achieving the “optimum level” of customization is a bit of a balancing act… go too far either way and you’ve got an unusable plugin!

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Two years ago I made the somewhat immodest claim that 2007 would be the “Year of jQuery.” Since then, jQuery‘s popularity has grown in ways that none of the core contributors could have imagined. Now I’m ready to make another bold pronouncement: 2009 will be the year of jQuery UI. Here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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