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 6. Building an Interactive Navigation Menu

In 2003, an article published on A List Apart (http://alistapart.com) called Suckerfish Dropdowns showed how HTML and CSS alone (with just a little JavaScript help for IE6) could be used to build a complex multilevel drop-down menu. The Suckerfish name derived from the gorgeously designed demo of the technique which featured illustrations of remoras and sharksuckers. While useful, the original requires that the site visitor not move their mouse outside the menu area while navigating or the menu disappears. Over the years, the Suckerfish Dropdowns have inspired a lot of spinoffs—Son of Suckerfish, Improved Suckerfish, and so on—that attempt to address the shortcomings of the original. Since jQuery can make everything better, we'll build on this idea using the Superfish jQuery plugin to make the menu easier to use.

The developer of the Superfish plugin, Joel Birch, says that most support issues with the plugin come from people not understanding...