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Javascript programming: The Complete Documentation

• This category contains 8 Papers
• The last paper was added on 2007-03-26 (YYYY-MM-DD)

Enhancing Structural Markup with JavaScript

Published on 2003-12-10, by Simon Willison, ©SitePoint Pty. Ltd..

Just a few years ago, the key skill involved in writing HTML was knowing enough table tricks to persuade the two major browsers to do more or less what you wanted them to. The modern Web is a very different beast, where the quality of your markup is judged on the basis of how well you use structural elements such as headers, paragraphs and lists to describe your content.

Expandable Listmenu Script

Published on 2002, by Daniel Nolan, ©Daniel Nolan.

One of the requirements of our new website at work was to create a list menu where you could click on some elements to expand/close different sections of the menu, similar to windows explorer.

The challenge I set myself was to create a script that required minimal markup changes and one that would degrade nicely in the majority of browsers.

I was aware of the expandable menus already available on Gazingus but I felt the amount of HTML markup you had to change to make the code work with the script was unsatisfactory for my needs. I needed to keep the markup simple as some of the menus would be written by people who's HTML skills were not necessarily very advanced.

The following script is the result of my efforts, it appears to degrade well in all the browsers I've tested and if there is no scripting enabled in the browser then the entire list will appear.

Make Internal Links Scroll Smoothly with JavaScript

Published on 2005-08-26, by Stuart Langridge, ©O'Reilly Media, Inc..

When they're navigating through a long document, users often are confused or disoriented when they click on a link that jumps to another location in that same document.

Are they on the same page, or a different page? Should they scroll more from here? What's going on?

The answer to this problem is to scroll the user through the document to the linked location, as you can see from this demo. In this tutorial, we'll use a smattering of JavaScript to ensure that links that are internal to the document scroll users to their destinations, rather than jumping straight there and confusing site visitors.

Quoting the Quotes

Published on 2003-11-25, by Henrik Stuart, ©Henrik Stuart.

This article describes a client-side workaround using JScript for the missing functionality in Microsoft Internet Explorer™ to add language-dependant quotation marks around, in particular, but also HTML elements.

Separating behavior and structure

Published on 2004-04-14, by Peter-Paul Koch, ©Digital Web Magazine.

In my previous column I confessed a fear for "accessibility zealots" who really are anti-JavaScript zealots. More than once I’ve encountered a hostile reaction to the idea of using any JavaScript at all, although fortunately this attitude remains confined to the fringes of Web development land.

Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms

Published on 2004-01-22, by Simon Willison, ©SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

Web developers loathe the task of building forms almost as much as users loathe having to fill them in. These are both unfortunate facts of the Web, but some smart JavaScript and intelligent CSS can go a long way to remedying the situation. In this article, I'll introduce a number of simple tricks for improving the usability of forms, and hopefully inspire you to improve on them and create your own.

I'm going to start off with some simple tricks, before introducing the interesting stuff later on. If the material seems too simple for you, feel free to skip ahead.

Unobtrusive Javascript

Published on 2005, by Christian Heilmann, ©Christian Heilmann.

Javascript is a wonderful tool to enhance the usability of web sites. It is the extra layer above the mark-up "what is this text" and the CSS how should it be displayed. Javascript adds a new dimension, the "how should this element behave".

On the following pages we will discuss and see how we can use Javascript, but still maintain accessibility. The technique to completely separate Javascript from the other two layers of web development has become commonly named "unobtrusive Javascript", as "accessible Javascript" does not quite cut it. You can have a perfectly separated Javascript and still be totally inaccessible.

XML importing script

Published on 2004, by Mark Wilton-Jones, ©Mark Wilton-Jones.

This XML importing script imports an external XML data file, such as a small amount of spurious data, or even an XML database, allows you to process the data, and you can then display it in any way you want. This is a DOM script that will work in 5th generation browsers like Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla/Netscape 6+, Opera 7+, Safari 1.2+ and ICEbrowser.