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

The hoverIntent plugin


Earlier, I pointed out that one problem with our menu was how quickly the menu reacted to the mouseover event. Any time the mouse is moved over the menu, the nested menus open. While that might seem like a good thing at first, it might be disconcerting or surprising to site visitors if they are simply moving their mouse on the screen and aren't intending to use the drop-down or fly-out menu.

The Superfish plugin has built-in support for the hoverIntent plugin. The hoverIntent plugin sort of pauses the mouseover event and makes the page wait to see if the mouse slows down or stops on an item to make sure it's what the site visitor intended to do. That way if the site visitor just happens to roll his/her mouse over the drop-down menu on their way to something else on the page, the submenus won't start appearing, throwing them into confusion.

If you'll recall, the hoverIntent plugin was actually included in the ZIP file when we downloaded the Superfish plugin.