Modifying your markup can be as easy or as difficult as you want. Using the innerHTML or the W3C DOM methods such as createElement, appendChild and insertBefore can allow you to manipulate anything on your web page to create some very interesting effects.
These techniques allow you to further enhance the user's web experience and are part of truly creating interactive content.
Should you use popup windows? Popup windows have gained a bad reputation from marketers' aggressive use of them, but even requested popups can be barriers to good usability. There are situations where popping a new window is arguably the most appropriate solution. Popups are mostly used for one-page interfaces or those in which history navigation is discouraged, such as a survey or a logon page for a commercial web site.
My use for external windows (not popups) use scripting that degrades if not available. We have already discussed this issue at our unobtrusive discussion.
One way to enhance a table style is to introduce a hover effect on the table rows: when the user is moving across the table with their mouse, the current row they are on will change color. This is something that you frequently see in interface design in internal web applications which help users view a particlar row of data.
Using many if or switch statements can make your code very long and complex in no time. A trick to avoid some of the bloating involves using something called the ternary operator.
The ternary operator syntax is:
var variable = condition ? trueValue:falseValue;
Web development happens on several layers:
As we have started to learn about the DOM this season, one thing that is an issue when developing your scripts is knowing when you can have your scripts execute. Remember, the DOM is available to you only when it has finished loading in the browser. You may ask, when has it finished loading? Good Question!
Since the emergence of Google Maps giving us the ability to put an interactive map on your own web page(s), there are now four separate APIs to choose from: Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth and MapQuest. These APIs are similar, so once you understand one; it is just a matter of learning the differences of the others.
Cookies are really the only way in which you can share user data between two non-sequential web pages. Cookies allow you to store data on users’ systems and retrieve it in minutes, hours or even days later. This makes cookies perfect for remembering things like users' login names, which pages they visited last, what they dropped into their shopping carts and when they did so.
Although server-side code is the most robust method of dealing with cookies, sometimes you need to manipulate cookies on the client side. Luckily, JavaScript can read and write cookies in exactly the same way servers do. Though the problem with JavaScript is that reading a cookie requires a little parsing to get them out. Don't worry, I found a nice little function to the job for us.
Timers are a way to add a dynamic aspect to your web pages. They can be used to create animations, open or close windows, pop up a message to the user, and even destoy a cookie for security purposes.
There are two types of timers: one that's set once, and one that reoccurs over an interval. Both can be canceled, though the one-time timer method fires just once.
