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

Chapter 5. Creating Custom Tooltips

Now that we've seen how powerful plugins are and how easy they make advanced functionality, let's see how we can take advantage of another plugin to make custom tooltips.

Browsers automatically create tooltips when you include the title attribute—usually on a link or an image. When your site visitor hovers their mouse cursor over the item or moves focus to the item by tabbing to it, the tooltip will appear—usually as a small yellow box that appears to be floating over the page. Tooltips are a great way to add a little additional information to your page. Screen reader software reads out tooltip text for site visitors with disabilities who are using assistive technology, making them useful for enhancing accessibility. Furthermore, title attributes on images and links can help search engines index your content more effectively.

In this chapter, we'll learn:

  • How to use Craig Thompson's qTip plugin to replace the browser's default tooltips

  • How to customize the...