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

Chapter 5. Animation, the Browser History Manager, and Cookies

The Animation Utility is used to add a variety of effects to your pages that can really bring your web application to life. It's a very easy component of the library to use, but delivers a powerful and robust mechanism by which elements can be made to grow, move, and even change color.

When using web-based applications that are based on DOM-scripted or AJAX-driven dynamic page changes, it is usually impossible to return to a previous page state using the back button of the browser. The Browser History Manager (BHM) Utility provided in the YUI is the first step towards a web of online applications where the functionality of the back and forward browser buttons has been restored.

The Cookies Utility allows us to improve the user experience by preserving a minimum set of settings on the client side. While we can keep full tables of user preferences on the server side by using database tables, we cannot do that for a user who has...