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 – customizing Superfish menus


Customizing a Superfish menu mostly involves writing your own CSS to style the menu the way you'd like. Here's how we'll create a custom look for the menu:

If you'll remember some web basics, you'll remember that CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. The cascading features are what we'll focus on here. Any styles we write for the top level of our menu are going to cascade down to the other levels of the menu. We have to remember that and handle all the cases where we'd rather stop a style from cascading downward.

  1. Let's get started by styling the top level of our menu. Since I'm using new CSS3 features, we're going to have to be prepared to write a bit of extra code so that each browser can handle our code gracefully. Here's the CSS we'll create for the top level of the menu. Place this code inside your styles.css file:

    /**** Level 1 ****/
    .sf-menu,
    .sf-menu *  {
      list-style:  none;
      margin: 0;
      padding: 0;
      }
    
    .sf-menu  {
      background: #f6f6f6...