Articles Tagged jQuery

The DOM and native browser API's have improved by leaps and bounds since jQuery's release all the way back in 2006. People have been writing "You Might Not Need jQuery" articles since 2013 (see this classic site and this classic repo). I don't want to rehash old territory, but a good bit has changed in browser land since the last You Might Not Need jQuery article you might have stumbled upon. Browsers continue to implement new APIs that take … Read article

Most WordPress themes show user Gravatars in the comment threads. It's a way of showing an image with the user, as associated by the email address used. It's a nice touch, and almost an expected design pattern these days.

Every one of those gravatars is an individual HTTP request though, like any other image. A comment thread with 50 comments means 50 HTTP requests, and they aren't always particularly tiny files. Yeesh.

Let's lazy load them.… Read article

One of the big reasons to use jQuery, for a long time, was how easy it made Ajax. It has a super clean, flexible, and cross-browser compatible API for all the Ajax methods. jQuery is still mega popular, but it's becoming more and more common to ditch it, especially as older browser share drops and new browsers have a lot of powerful stuff we used to learn on jQuery for. Even just querySelectorAll is often cited as a reason to … Read article

Many sites with lots of written content employ specially crafted print style sheets. That way, a user can print out the relevant content without wasting paper on navigation, ads, or anything else not germane.

Articulate.js, a jQuery plugin, is what I consider the narrative equivalent. With as little as one line of code, it enables developers to create links that allow users to click, sit back, and listen to the browser read aloud the important content of a web … Read article

I posted about jQuery UI's position feature years ago, but I was just thinking of how useful the collision detection part of that feature is. In a nutshell: you can position an element where you want them to go, but if it calculates that where you're putting it would be offscreen or otherwise hidden, it will adjust the positioning to fix it. … Read article

I don't always write CoffeeScript, but when I do, I'm probably using jQuery too; I always forget the syntax for stuff. So I'm going to write it all down here so I can reference it until I memorize it.… Read article

Let's say there is a feature on your website that only gets used 5% of the time. That feature requires some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to work. So you decide that instead of having that HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the page directly, you're going to Ajax that stuff in when the feature is about to be used.

We'll need to make three Ajax requests. Since we don't want to show anything to the user until the feature is ready … Read article

Aside from a few esoteric tricks involving stuff like the resize handle on textareas, draggable elements is JavaScript territory on the web. E.g. click on element, hold down mouse button, drag mouse cursor, element drags with the mouse, release mouse button to release element. Or the touch equivalents. Fortunately this is well-tread territory. Time tested tools like jQuery UI offer Draggable (and other similar methods) to make this easy.

But recently in trying to achieve a certain effect (see title … Read article

It's really easy to add an event listener in jQuery. It's equally easy to remove an event listener. You might want to remove a listener because you don't care to perform any actions on that event anymore, to reduce memory usage, or both. But let's say you've attached several listeners to the same event. How do you remove just one of them? Namespacing can help.… Read article

I couldn't be more pleased to announce that I finished a brand new course for The Lodge. It's called Learning jQuery From Scratch and I bet you can guess what it's about. … Read article

What if someone signs up for your web app and they type in their email address as susan_smith@gmaoil.com? They don't notice, they never get their confirmation email, they never can log in again, the "forgot password" feature doesn't work, and there is a lot of frustration and finger pointing.

Can't we help with that?… Read article

A question came up in a semi-recent ShopTalk episode about the use of jQuery in tutorials.

Lately I've begun to realize how muddled the line between jQuery and JavaScript has become when learning about the language. It's hard to find a solid tutorial that doesn't include jQuery instead of JavaScript. What's your opinion on the overuse of the library?

It's a common need in web apps: you click something and the text of the thing you just clicked changes. Perhaps something simple like a "Show" button that swaps to "Hide", or "Expand Description" to "Collapse Description." This is a fairly simple thing to do, but there are various considerations to make. Let's cover a bunch of ways.… Read article