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.
There may be times when you need to loop through elements in jQuery to collect information, change state or some other nifty trick that can’t be done easily using jQuery’s various selection etc functions. This post has an example of looping through elements with jQuery by getting all the href attributes from the <a> tags of a selected element.
As well as putting “javascript” as the language or type element of the <script> tag you can specify a version, for example javascript1.5. What this means is that browsers that do not support that version of Javascript will not run the code in that <script> block. I was interested to find out if this meant …
Last week I looked at how to get the total number of matched elements with jQuery which also showed how to tell if an element exists with jQuery. I’ve decided to create a second post just showing how to tell if an element exists to make it easier to find this functionality when searching this blog.
Yesterday I posted how to add an offsite link icon after external links with CSS and in this post look at how to do the same thing but with jQuery instead of CSS. This allows the offsite links to appear in Internet Explorer 6 because the a[href^="http://"] type selector is not supported in IE6.
When a CSS or Javascript file is changed the visitor’s browser needs to get the latest copy of the file to reflect the changes, but it will have been cached and may cause rendering or functionality issues depending on the changes. To force reloading of the CSS and Javascript file the files should be renamed each time they are changed; this can be automated by using PHP to add the timestamp of the file into the filename.
There may be times when you need to work out how many times a particular element appears on a page or within a section with Javascript and this is easy to do with jQuery using the length property. Using the method in this post you can also work out if an element exists on the page with jQuery.