JavaScript & JQuery

Textarea Auto Resize

Textarea Auto Resize On a current project, I was trying to find a way to auto-resize a textarea according to some content that would be loaded in dynamically via Ajax. I didn’t know the height of the content and the textarea element doesn’t resize naturally like other HTML elements, so I needed to update the height of the element with JavaScript each time the content changed.

It seemed like a simple task. After doing a search to see what types of plugins and scripts were floating around to do this, the examples I found seemed a little overly complex. While most solutions seemed to incorporate some complex math calculations, I thought of a better way.

Dealing with Empty Elements in CSS3 Animations

Dealing with Empty Elements in CSS3 Animations Earlier this month, Chris Coyier posted an article discussing a way to deal with the empty elements that are often needed when doing CSS3 animation.

Chris’s solution is interesting. He basically suggests (and I’m paraphrasing here) that we can give the empty elements semantic value by adding some text in each one to describe what each animated element does, or what mood it conveys. Then, the text in those empty elements can be moved off the page with CSS.

Some people got in a tizzy over the potential SEO penalties that could arise (which I kindly pointed out is probably not an issue) while others seemed to have a problem with Chris’s use of the word “semantic”.

Calling a PHP File From HTML’s Script Tag

Calling a PHP File From HTML's Script Tag Okay, admittedly, this is a pretty crazy and virtually useless tip. But it’s just one of those things that illustrates the flexibility of our craft and how sometimes solutions to problems can be found from some really outside-the-box thinking.

Back when I worked for a Toronto web design agency, we often had to update sites that were written in straight HTML, with no server-side programming at all. So every year, clients that owned such sites would ask us to update all the pages to display the current copyright year. That was pretty lame. Not exactly the kind of work we wanted to be doing.

So we wanted to create a way that the current year would be printed on each page automatically. But we didn’t want to include a JavaScript library, we didn’t want to use Ajax, and we wanted the year to come from the server, not the client.

Triggering CSS3 Transitions With JavaScript

Triggering CSS3 Transitions With JavaScript At the beginning of this month I wrote a post accompanied by five demo pages that showed that CSS3 transitions could be triggered with a number of different events/states in CSS.

That alone should help you see how these types of simple animations work. But let’s take this a bit further.

CSS pseudo-classes and media queries (which I used in that other post to trigger the transitions) represent certain states for certain elements. These states occur after specific events on the page. So naturally, CSS3 transitions can also be fired using any JavaScript event. Let’s try a simple click event that toggles a class name.

A Bookmarklet to Fix Wikipedia’s Layout in a Wide Browser Window

A Bookmarklet to Fix Wikipedia's Layout on a Wide Browser Window I have a wide monitor and I like my windows to be maximised (I’m on Windows 7). I also like when Chrome is maximised, because I usually have about 7,623 tabs open at any given time, so the bigger the window, the better.

Thus, when I visit a page on Wikipedia, it’s unreadable — because Wikipedia’s layout is fluid and it fills the whole monitor. It normally looks like this:

How is the DOM Affected by Improperly Nested HTML Elements?

How is the DOM Affected by Improperly Nested HTML Elements? Here’s something interesting I came across while reading Introducing HTML5 by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp, which I recently purchased.

In one of the early chapters, Bruce mentions that when tags are not nested properly, the resulting generated DOM will be seen differently in different browsers. Of course, when you “view source”, the code will be the same in all browsers. It’s when you inspect the page (or view the “generated source”) using developer tools that the results can differ.

After some testing, this is indeed the case. Here’s the code that I tested:

What’s the Best Way to Write a JavaScript For Loop?

What's the Best Way to Write a JavaScript For Loop? When coding JavaScript, I find myself using the for loop fairly often. Recently, when I coded, then re-coded these drop-down menus, during the re-code I ran my JavaScript/jQuery through JSLint using the option called “The Good Parts”.

I don’t know a whole lot about JSLint, but I figured that would be a pretty good way to ensure the code was efficient, relatively future-proof, and easy to maintain (i.e. it uses best practices).

The info JSLint provided, as well as other stuff I’ve read in the past, got me thinking about the simple JavaScript for loop and how it’s customarily written.

Slide-Down Mega Drop-Down Menus with Ajax and jQuery

Slide-Down Mega Drop-Down Menus with Ajax While reading an article on CBC’s website, I noticed they have added what seem to be newly-designed mega drop-down menus that work in an interesting kind of way.

These looked like a cool and simple thing to reproduce, so I gave it a shot and came up with something that I think works pretty nicely.

It wasn’t as simple as I thought, and I don’t think my code is the greatest, so I’m open to suggestions. I think this could form the basis for a jQuery plugin but I’ve never created a jQuery plugin so holding I’m off on that for now.

jQuery Tutorial for Beginners Downloadable PDF

jQuery Tutorial for Beginners Downloadable PDF A little over a month ago, I published a fast-paced jQuery tutorial that went through a bunch of the syntax basics, to help those new to jQuery get up and running with it as quickly as possible.

In the comments, someone named Kelly said they saved the page as a PDF. I thought that was a great idea, so I thought I would reformat the entire tutorial as a PDF for easy downloading and printing.

How to Dynamically Highlight Content Like Wikipedia Using CSS3

Dynamically Highlighting Footnotes If you’ve ever clicked on a footnote link in a Wikipedia article, you’ve probably noticed that two things happen: (1) the link brings you to the footnote section at the bottom of the page; and (2) the selected footnote is highlighted with a different color. In a list of footnotes, this feature makes it easy for the reader to visually access the appropriate footnote.

This is a neat little technique that is accomplished easily using the CSS3 :target pseudo-class selector. Unfortunately, this is another CSS3 feature that has no support in Internet Explorer, and so has been largely overlooked up to this point.

In this brief tutorial, I’ll show you how it’s used, and also provide a quick little JavaScript solution that can be added to an IE-only external script to get it to work cross-browser. IE (all three versions) is the only browser that fails to offer support for this very practical CSS3 feature.