Book Image

jQuery Plugin Development Beginner's Guide

By : Giulio Bai
Book Image

jQuery Plugin Development Beginner's Guide

By: Giulio Bai

Overview of this book

<p>jQuery is the most famous JavaScript library. If you use jQuery a lot, it can be a good idea to start packaging your code into plugins. A jQuery plugin is simply a way to put your code into a package, which makes it easier to maintain your code and use across different projects. While basic scripting is relatively straightforward, writing plugins can leave people scratching their heads.<br /><br />With this exhaustive guide in hand, you can start building your own plugins in a matter of minutes! This book takes you beyond the basics of jQuery and enables you to take full advantage of jQuery's powerful plugin architecture to deliver highly interactive content to your website viewers.<br /><br />This book contains all the information you need to successfully author your very own jQuery plugin with a particular focus on the practical aspect of design and development. <br /><br />This book will also cover some details of real life plugins and explain their functioning to gain a better understanding of the overall concept of plugin development and jQuery plugin architecture.<br /><br />Different topics regarding plugin development are discussed, and you will learn how to develop many types of add-ons, ranging from media plugins (such as slideshows, video and audio controls, and so on) to various utilities (image pre-loading, handling cookies) and use and applications of jQuery effects and animations (sliding, fading, combined animations) to eventually demonstrate how all of these plugins can be merged and give birth to a new, more complex, and multipurpose script that comes in handy in a lot of situations.</p>
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
jQuery 1.4 Plugin Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Setting equal heights


Who can state that they have never been presented with the problem of making two or more columns of the same height? Designers are terrified by this.

Yeah, I can almost hear all the CSS purists out there advocating the cross-browser compatibility and the consistency of a web page by avoiding any other code block, and eventually criticizing the need for JavaScript to be enabled. But let's face it, since table-based layouts have been abandoned for the more flexible, visually appealing, modern design guidelines, we've failed to see many HTML+CSS equal-height columns.

Indeed, JavaScript offers a simple, quick, and unobtrusive workaround, which is worth the effort even in terms of usability and performance.

However, with the so-called faux-columns technique, introduced by Dan Cederholm on A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/), CSS can actually be used to create equal-height columns, even though this technique is best suited for entire page layouts...