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

Ajax and events


Suppose we wanted to allow each dictionary term name to control the display of the definition that follows; clicking on the term name would show or hide the associated definition. With the techniques we have seen so far, this should be pretty straightforward:

// Unfinished code
$(document).ready(function() {
  $('h3.term').click(function() {
    $(this).siblings('.definition').slideToggle();
  });
});

Listing 6.18

When a term is clicked, this code finds siblings of the element that have a class of definition, and slides them up or down as appropriate.

All seems in order, but a click does nothing with this code. Unfortunately, the terms have not yet been added to the document when we attach the click handlers. Even if we managed to attach click handlers to these items, once we clicked on a different letter the handlers would no longer be attached.

This is a common problem with areas of a page populated by Ajax. A popular solution is to rebind handlers each time the page area is...