Book Image

YUI 2.8: Learning the Library

Book Image

YUI 2.8: Learning the Library

Overview of this book

The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls written in JavaScript for building Rich Internet Applications, across all major browsers and independently of any server technology. There's a lot of functionality baked into YUI, but getting to and understanding that functionality is not for the faint of heart. This book gives you a clear picture of YUI through a step-by-step approach, packed with lots of examples.YUI 2.8: Learning the Library covers all released (non-beta) components of the YUI 2.8 Library in detail with plenty of working examples, looking at the classes that make up each component and the properties and methods that can be used. It includes a series of practical examples to reinforce how each component should/can be used, showing its use to create complex, fully featured, cross-browser, Web 2.0 user interfaces. It has been updated from its first edition with the addition of several chapters covering several new controls and enriched with lots of experience of using them.You will learn to create a number of powerful JavaScript controls that can be used straightaway in your own applications. Besides giving you a deep understanding of the YUI library, this book will expand your knowledge of object-oriented JavaScript programming, as well as strengthen your understanding of the DOM and CSS. The final chapter describes many of the tools available to assist you the developer in debugging, maintaining, and ensuring the best quality in your code. In this new edition, all the examples have been updated to use the most recent coding practices and style and new ones added to cover newer components. Since the basic documentation for the library is available online, the focus is on providing insight and experience.The authors take the reader from beginner to advanced-level YUI usage and understanding.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
YUI 2.8 Learning the Library
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

YUI event capturing


The YUI provides a unified event model that works across all A-grade browsers. It also introduces an interface that allows you to create your own custom events. These are important enhancements in several ways.

Firstly, you can save yourself a lot of code as the event handlers can be attached to almost any element in a consistent way, regardless of peculiarities in their inner workings. Handlers can even be attached to multiple elements with ease or multiple handlers can be attached to a single element. A word of caution: if a browser does not signal a particular event, or the Event Utility cannot guess it from other clues, the event will simply not be fired. It is a good idea to check PPK's Quirksmode site, mentioned previously; if the Event Utility does not fire an event you expect, it might simply be because the browser itself doesn't.

The event object and how it is accessed has also been refined so that it can be obtained in the same way regardless of the browser to...