html api Archives - CSS-Tricks

Creating a Parking Game With the HTML Drag and Drop API

# March 8, 2018 By Omayeli Arenyeka

Among the many JavaScript APIs added in HTML5 was Drag and Drop (we’ll refer to it as DnD in this article) which brought native DnD support to the browser, making it easier for developers to implement this interactive feature into applications. The amazing thing that happens when features become easier to implement is that people start making all kinds of silly, impractical things with it, like the one we’re making today: a parking game!

DnD requires only a few things to work:

Something to drag
Somewhere to drop
JavaScript event handlers on the target to tell the browser it can drop

We’re going to start by creating our draggables.

(more…)

HTML APIs: What They Are And How To Design A Good One

# February 25, 2017 By Robin Rendle

Lea Verou writes about the design of HTML APIs and how we might write better documentation for web designers. An HTML API is term for a JavaScript library that is configured and controlled through HTML rather than through JavaScript. For example <div data-open-modal="#modal"></div> might tell a library that this element is in charge of opening a modal. There is no configuration or initting other than loading the library itself.

My favorite part of this piece is where Lea confronts what might generally be seen as a simple plug-n-play JavaScript library:

Even this tiny snippet of code requires people to understand object literals, arrays, variables, strings, how to get a reference to a DOM element, events, when the DOM is ready and much more. Things that seem trivial to programmers can be an uphill battle to HTML authors with no JavaScript knowledge

By giving folks an HTML API we can avoid potential headache.

...remember that many of these people do not speak any programming language, not just JavaScript. Do not talk about models, views, controllers or other software engineering concepts in text that you expect them to read and understand. All you will achieve is confusing them and turning them away.

Lea's made a collection of libraries that have HTML APIs.

html api JavaScript