Book Image

jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Book Image

jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Overview of this book

Modern web application user interface design requires rapid development and proven results. jQuery UI, a trusted suite of official plug-ins for the jQuery JavaScript library, gives you a solid platform on which to build rich and engaging interfaces with maximum compatibility and stability, and minimum time and effort. jQuery UI has a series of ready-made, great-looking user interface widgets and a comprehensive set of core interaction helpers designed to be implemented in a consistent and developer-friendly way. With all this, the amount of code that you need to write personally to take a project from conception to completion is drastically reduced. Specially revised for version 1.7 of jQuery UI, this book has been written to maximize your experience with the library by breaking down each component and walking you through examples that progressively build upon your knowledge, taking you from beginner to advanced usage in a series of easy-to-follow steps. In this book, you'll learn how each component can be initialized in a basic default implementation and then see how easy it is to customize its appearance and configure its behavior to tailor it to the requirements of your application. You'll look at the configuration options and the methods exposed by each component's API to see how these can be used to bring out the best of the library. Events play a key role in any modern web application if it is to meet the expected minimum requirements of interactivity and responsiveness, and each chapter will show you the custom events fired by the component covered and how these events can be intercepted and acted upon.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery UI 1.7
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. The Accordion Widget

The accordion widget is another UI widget that allows you to group content into separate panels which can be opened or closed by visitor interaction. Therefore, most of its content is initially hidden from view, much like tabs widget that we looked at in the previous chapter.

Each container has a heading element associated with it that is used to open the container and display the content. When you click on a heading its content will slide into view below it. The currently visible content is hidden while the new content is shown when you click on another heading.

The accordion widget is a robust and highly configurable widget that allows you to save space on your web pages by displaying only a single panel of content at any time. This is like a tabbed interface but positioned vertically instead of horizontally. The following screenshot shows an example of an accordion widget:

It's easy to use for your visitors and easy to implement for us. It has a range of configurable...