Book Image

jQuery UI Cookbook

By : Adam Boduch
Book Image

jQuery UI Cookbook

By: Adam Boduch

Overview of this book

jQuery UI is the quintessential framework for creating professional user interfaces. While jQuery core lays the foundation for interaction with the DOM and handling events, jQuery UI fills in the user interaction gap. This book will give you a huge productivity boost out of the box with jQuery UI, and help you understand the framework, inside and out."jQuery UI Cookbook" provides you with practical recipes featuring in-depth coverage of every widget in the framework, including how to address limitations that impact your everyday development activities with these widgets. You'll get a better idea of the big picture – how the framework is composed, how the widgets relate to one another, and how to build on those patterns.Be it a minor tweak on the visual design of a progress bar or a fundamental change in a widget to meet your needs, "jQuery UI Cookbook" covers scenarios both big and small. You can show reminders as tooltips, apply a variety of effects to the menu widget, and start interactions between the dialog widget and API data using deferred objects. These and many more interesting tasks are covered in this book, which can be done with smooth learning and great understanding. You will see how button widgets can fill the width of their containing element, making the layout more consistent. Tabs can be sorted and moved between widgets. You will learn how to do all these things within the context of the big picture, by finding out why the components work the way they do, making you well-versed in jQuery UI.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery UI Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using tabs as URL navigation links


The tabs widget isn't limited to populating tab panels using preloaded div elements or by making Ajax calls. Some applications already have many components built, and lots of content to display. If you're updating a site, or application such as this, the tabs widget might be useful as the main form of navigation, especially if you're already using jQuery UI widgets. What we would need then is something generic that could be applied to every page, without much effort on the part of the developer using the widget. Although the tabs widget wasn't designed for such a purpose, we're not going to let that stop us because with a little tweaking, we can create a generic component that gives us exactly what we need.

How to do it...

The first thing we'll look at is the content on one of the pages in our application. The HTML defines both the tabs widget structure and the content displayed under the active tab.

<div id="nav">
    <ul>
        <li>
...