Book Image

Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials: Client-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Explained

Book Image

Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials: Client-side ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Explained

Overview of this book

Microsoft AJAX Library Essentials is a practical reference for the client-side library of the ASP.NET AJAX Framework 1.0, and a tutorial for the underlying technologies and techniques required to use the library at its full potential. The main goal of this book is to get you comfortable with the Microsoft AJAX Library, a huge set of functions that can be used for developing powerful client-side functionality.Beginning with a hands-on tour of the basic technologies associated with AJAX, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest, JSON, and the DOM, you'll move on to a crash course in the Microsoft AJAX tools. You will learn, through numerous step-by-step exercises, how to create basic AJAX applications, how the object-based programming model of JavaScript works, and how Microsoft AJAX Library extends this model. You'll understand the architecture of the Microsoft AJAX components, how they all fit together, and exactly what they can do for you. Then you will learn how to use the Microsoft AJAX Library in your web projects, and a detailed case study will walk you through creating your own customized client components. At every stage of your journey, you'll be able to try out examples to illuminate the theory, and consolidate your understanding. In addition to learning about the client and server controls, you'll also see how to handle errors and debug your AJAX applications.To complement your new found skills, the book ends with a visual reference of the Microsoft AJAX Library namespaces and classes, including diagrams and quick explanations for all the classes mentioned in the book, providing an invaluable reference you will turn to again and again.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Copyright
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

JavaScript Events and the DOM


In the next exercise, we will create a simple HTML structure from JavaScript code using the DOM. When creating a web page that has dynamically generated parts, you first need to create its template (which contains the static parts), and use placeholders for the dynamic parts. The placeholders must be uniquely identifiable HTML elements (elements with the ID attribute set).

The typical elements used as placeholders are <div> and <span>, due to their generic usage purpose. In practice they’re typically used in conjunction with CSS to customize the appearance of the displayed content. The <div> and <span> elements are nicely (and briefly) described at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_and_div .

Take a look at the following HTML document:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/
TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>AJAX Tutorial: JavaScript Events and DOM</title&gt...