Book Image

Learning jQuery, Third Edition

Book Image

Learning jQuery, Third Edition

Overview of this book

To build interesting, interactive sites, developers are turning to JavaScript libraries such as jQuery to automate common tasks and simplify complicated ones. Because many web developers have more experience with HTML and CSS than with JavaScript, the library's design lends itself to a quick start for designers with little programming experience. Experienced programmers will also be aided by its conceptual consistency.Learning jQuery Third Edition is revised and updated for version 1.6 of jQuery. You will learn the basics of jQuery for adding interactions and animations to your pages. Even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left you baffled, this book will guide you past the pitfalls associated with AJAX, events, effects, and advanced JavaScript language features.Starting with an introduction to jQuery, you will first be shown how to write a functioning jQuery program in just three lines of code. Learn how to add impact to your actions through a set of simple visual effects and to create, copy, reassemble, and embellish content using jQuery's DOM modification methods. The book will step you through many detailed, real-world examples, and even equip you to extend the jQuery library itself with your own plug-ins.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Learning jQuery Third Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Progressive enhancement with Ajax


Many times now we have encountered the concept of progressive enhancement. To reiterate, this philosophy ensures a positive user experience for all users by mandating that a working product be put in place first, before additional embellishments are added for users with modern browsers.

Ajax-heavy applications run a particular risk of being unusable without JavaScript enabled. To combat this, we can initially construct a traditional client-server page architecture using forms, and then change these forms to be more efficient if JavaScript is there to help us.

As an example, we'll build a form that searches the jQuery API documentation. As a form already exists for this purpose on the jQuery site, we can piggy-back on that form for our own purposes:

<form id="ajax-form"
    action="http://api.jquery.com/" method="get">
  <fieldset>
    <div class="text">
      <label for="title">Search</label>
      <input type="text" id="title...