Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By : Natalie Maclees
Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By: Natalie Maclees

Overview of this book

jQuery is awesome for designers ñ it builds easily on the CSS and HTML you already know and allows you to create impressive effects with just a few lines of code. However, without a background in programming, JavaScript ñ on which jQuery is built ñ can feel intimidating and impossible to grasp. This book will show you how simple it can be to learn the basics and then extend your capabilities by taking advantage of jQuery plugins.jQuery for Designers offers approachable lessons for designers with little or no background in JavaScript. The book begins by introducing the jQuery library and a small and simple introduction to JavaScript. Then you'll step through a few simple tasks to get your feet wet before diving into using plugins to quickly and simply add complex effects with just a few lines of code.You'll be surprised at how far you can get with JavaScript when you start with the power of the jQuery library and this book will show you how. We'll cover common interface widgets and effects such as tabbed interfaces, custom tooltips, and custom scrollbars. You'll learn how to create an animated navigation menu and how to add simple AJAX effects to enhance your site visitors' experience. Then we'll wrap up with interactive data grids which make sorting and searching data easy.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – setting up an HTML5 web form


  1. We'll get started with a simple HTML document and the associated files and folders, just like we set up in Chapter 1, Designer, Meet jQuery. We want to make sure to use the HTML5 doctype in our document type declaration at the top of the document:

    <!DOCTYPE html>

    After all those long and convoluted document type declarations used by HTML 4 and xHTML, this one is a breath of fresh air, isn't it?

  2. Now, inside the <body> tag, open up a <form> tag as follows:

    <form action="#" id="account-form">
    </form>

    The form tag needs an action attribute in order to work. Since our forms are just dummy forms for scripting and styling purposes, we'll just use # as the value of that attribute. The value of the action attribute is usually a URL—the place on the server where we're going to send our form data for processing. We also added an id attribute to make it easy to select the form for CSS and JavaScript purposes later.

  3. Next up, we'll...