Javascript is a programming or scripting language primarily used for client-sided programming in web browsers. It can also be used as a server-side programming language but this is generally used less often. Javascript was originally created by Netscape for their browser Netscape Navigator, and is now an implementation of the ECMAScript standard. It is typically used in web browsers for form validation, floating navigation, AJAX and other nifty things to make web pages more interactive.
I needed to convert a string to lower case the other day with Javascript and wasn’t sure of the exact function name, so turned to my blog but was surprised I didn’t have a post about how to do this… so here it is now.
This post shows how to have a animated information box with jQuery. There are a series of links and when the user either clicks the link or moves their mouse over it, the content in the box next to it changes. This can be useful when showing features of a software product, web hosting etc.
Although it should be avoided where possible, there may be times when something on a web page needs to be adjusted if the window size is changed. This can be done quite easily with jQuery but it needs to be done with caution as I show in this post how different browsers react to $(window).resize()
jQuery’s animate() function can do a lot of useful animation effects (see here for some more examples and documentation on the jQuery website). Something I found useful the other day is that it’s possible to move a div relatively left or right using the animate function, e.g. you can move it50px to the right from its current position, instead of to an absolute position.
The Superfish jQuery plug-in creates Suckerfish style flyout menus from HTML unordered lists and is very easy to use. It can work entirely with CSS alone but the jQuery bits add some enhancements. This post demonstrates how simple it is to use.
If you’re using a Javascript library like jQuery it’s likely you’ll end up with many Javascript files that need to be included in each page request. Ideally these should be combined into a single file and minified to cut down on page load time. This post shows how to use jsmin-phpto combine multiple Javascript files into a single minified file.