Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By : Natalie Maclees
Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By: Natalie Maclees

Overview of this book

jQuery is awesome for designers ñ it builds easily on the CSS and HTML you already know and allows you to create impressive effects with just a few lines of code. However, without a background in programming, JavaScript ñ on which jQuery is built ñ can feel intimidating and impossible to grasp. This book will show you how simple it can be to learn the basics and then extend your capabilities by taking advantage of jQuery plugins.jQuery for Designers offers approachable lessons for designers with little or no background in JavaScript. The book begins by introducing the jQuery library and a small and simple introduction to JavaScript. Then you'll step through a few simple tasks to get your feet wet before diving into using plugins to quickly and simply add complex effects with just a few lines of code.You'll be surprised at how far you can get with JavaScript when you start with the power of the jQuery library and this book will show you how. We'll cover common interface widgets and effects such as tabbed interfaces, custom tooltips, and custom scrollbars. You'll learn how to create an animated navigation menu and how to add simple AJAX effects to enhance your site visitors' experience. Then we'll wrap up with interactive data grids which make sorting and searching data easy.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – moving around an HTML document


  1. We're going to keep working with the files we set up in the previous section. Open up the scripts.js file that's inside your scripts folder. After the document ready statement, write a new empty function called dynamicFaq:

    function dynamicFaq() {
           //our FAQ code will go here
    }
  2. Let's think through how we would like this page to behave. We would like to have all the answers to our questions hidden when the page is loaded, then when a user finds the question they're looking for, we would like to show the associated answer when they click the question.

    That means the first thing we'll need to do is hide all the answers when the page loads. That's as simple as selecting all of our <dd> elements and hiding them. Inside your dynamicFaq function, add a line of code to hide the <dd> elements:

    function dynamicFaq() {
       $('dd').hide();
    }

    Note

    You might be wondering why we didn't use CSS to set the display of the <dd> tags to none....