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Home > Web Development > Front End Web Development > Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques
Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques
Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

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Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

Chapter 2. Selectors—How to Get Anything You Want

 

She’s just the girl

She’s just the girl

The girl you want

 
 -- Devo, “Girl U Want”

jQuery harnesses the power of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and XPath selectors to let us quickly and easily access elements or groups of elements in the Document Object Model (DOM). In this chapter, we will explore a few of these CSS and XPath selectors, as well as jQuery’s own custom selectors. We’ll also look at jQuery’s DOM traversal methods that provide even greater flexibility for getting what we want.

The Document Object Model

One of the most powerful aspects of jQuery is its ability to make DOM traversal easy. The Document Object Model is a family-tree structure of sorts. HTML, like other markup languages, uses this model to describe the relationships of things on a page. When we refer to these relationships, we use the same terminology that we use when referring to family relationships—parents, children, and so on. A simple example can help us...

The Document Object Model

One of the most powerful aspects of jQuery is its ability to make DOM traversal easy. The Document Object Model is a family-tree structure of sorts. HTML, like other markup languages, uses this model to describe the relationships of things on a page. When we refer to these relationships, we use the same terminology that we use when referring to family relationships—parents, children, and so on. A simple example can help us understand how the family tree metaphor applies to a document:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>the title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div>
      <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
      <p>This is another paragraph.</p>
      <p>This is yet another paragraph.</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Here, <html> is the ancestor of all the other elements; in other words, all the other elements are descendants of <html>. The <head> and <body>...

The $() Factory Function

No matter which type of selector we want to use in jQuery—be it CSS, XPath, or custom—we always start with the dollar sign and parentheses: $()

As mentioned in Chapter 1, the $() function removes the need to do a for loop to access a group of elements since whatever we put inside the parentheses will be looped through automatically and stored as a jQuery object. We can put just about anything inside the parentheses of the $() function. A few of the more common examples include:

  • A tag name: .  $('p') gets all paragraphs in the document.

  • An ID: .  $('#some-id') gets the single element in the document that has the corresponding some-id ID.

  • A class: .  $('.some-class') gets all elements in the document that have a class of some-class.

Note

Making jQuery Play Well with Other JavaScript Libraries

In jQuery, the dollar sign $ is simply shorthand for jQuery. Because a $() function is very common in JavaScript libraries, conflicts could arise if more than one of these libraries...

CSS Selectors

jQuery supports most of the selectors included in CSS specifications 1 through 3, as outlined on the World Wide Web Consortium’s site: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/#specs. This support allows developers to enhance their websites without worrying about which browsers (particularly Internet Explorer 6 and below) might not understand advanced selectors, as long as the browsers have JavaScript enabled.

Note

Responsible jQuery developers should always apply the concepts of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation to their code, ensuring that a page will render as accurately, even if not as beautifully, with JavaScript disabled as it does with JavaScript turned on. We will continue to explore these concepts throughout the book.

To begin learning how jQuery works with CSS selectors, we’ll use a structure that appears on many websites, often for navigation—the nested, unordered list.

<ul id="selected-plays">
  <li>Comedies
    <ul>
      <li><a href="http...

XPath Selectors

XML Path Language (XPath) is a type of language for identifying different elements or their values within XML documents, similar to the way CSS identifies elements in HTML documents. The jQuery library supports a basic set of XPath selectors that we can use alongside CSS selectors, if we so desire. And with jQuery, both XPath and CSS selectors can be used regardless of the document type.

When it comes to attribute selectors, jQuery uses the XPath convention of identifying attributes by prefixing them with the @ symbol inside square brackets, rather than the less-flexible CSS equivalent. For example, to select all links that have a title attribute, we would write the following:

$('a[@title]')

This XPath syntax allows for another use of square brackets, without the @, to designate an element that is contained within another element. We can, for example, get all div elements that contain an ol element with the following selector expression:

$('div[ol]')

Styling Links

Attribute selectors...

Custom Selectors

To the wide variety of CSS and XPath selectors, jQuery adds its own custom selectors. Most of the custom selectors allow us to pick certain elements out of a line-up, so to speak. The syntax is the same as the CSS pseudo-class syntax, where the selector starts with a colon (:). For example, if we wanted to select the second item from a matched set of divs with a class of horizontal, we would write it like this:

$('div.horizontal:eq(1)')

Note that the eq(1) gets the second item from the set because JavaScript array numbering is zero-based, meaning that it starts with 0. In contrast, CSS is one-based, so a CSS selector such as $('div:nth-child(1)') gets any div that is the first child of its parent.

Styling Alternate Rows

Two very useful custom selectors in the jQuery library are :odd and :even. Let’s take a look at how we can use these selectors for basic table striping, given the following table:

<table>
<tr>
  <td>As You Like It</td>
  <td>Comedy...

DOM Traversal Methods

The jQuery selectors that we have explored so far allow us to get a set of elements as we navigate across and down the DOM tree and filter the results. If this were the only way to get elements, our options would be quite limited (although, frankly, the selector expressions on their own are robust in their own right, especially when compared to the regular DOM scripting). There are many occasions on which getting a parent or ancestor element is essential. And that is where jQuery’s DOM traversal methods come to play. With these methods at our disposal, we can go up, down, and all around the DOM tree with ease.

Some of the methods have a nearly identical counterpart among the selector expressions. For example, the line we used to add the odd class, $('tr:odd'). addClass('odd');, could be rewritten with the .filter() method as follows:

$('tr').filter(':odd').addClass('odd');

For the most part, however, the two ways of getting elements complement each other. Let’s take a...

Accessing DOM Elements

Every selector expression and most jQuery methods return a jQuery object, which is almost always what we want, because of the implicit iteration and chaining capabilities that it affords.

Still, there may be points in our code when we need to access a DOM element directly. For example, we may need to make a resulting set of elements available to another JavaScript library. Or we might need to access an element’s tag name. For these admittedly rare situations, jQuery provides the .get() method. To access the first DOM element referred to by a jQuery object, we would use .get(0). If the DOM element is needed within a loop, we would use .get(index). So, if we want to know the tag name of an element with id="my-element", we would write:

var myTag = $('#my-element').get(0).tagName;

For even greater convenience, jQuery provides a shorthand for .get(). Instead of writing $('#my-element').get(0), for example, we can use square brackets immediately following the selector: ...

Summary

With the techniques that we have covered in this chapter, we should now be able to style top-level and sub-level items in a nested list by using CSS selectors, apply different styles to different types of links by using XPath attribute selectors, add rudimentary striping to a table by using the custom jQuery selectors :odd and :even, and highlight text within certain table cells by chaining jQuery methods.

So far, we have been using the $(document).ready() event to add a class to a matched set of elements. In the next chapter, we’ll explore ways in which to add a class in response to a variety of user-initiated events.

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What you will learn

  • Use selectors to get anything you want from a page Make things happen on your page with events Add flair to your actions with animation effects Change your page on command with DOM manipulation Use AJAX to make your site buzzword compliant! Transform drab, static information containers into beautiful, dynamic tables Breathe new life into online forms Create dynamic shufflers, rotators, and galleries Get started with three official jQuery plug-ins, and even write your own

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Publication date : Jul 07, 2007
Length: 380 pages
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Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781847192516
Category :
Web Development
Languages :
JavaScript
Concepts :
Front End Web Development
Tools :
jQuery

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Languages :
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Tools :
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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
Getting Started Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Getting Started
What jQuery Does
Why jQuery Works Well
Our First jQuery Document
Summary
Selectors—How to Get Anything You Want Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Selectors—How to Get Anything You Want
The Document Object Model
The $() Factory Function
CSS Selectors
XPath Selectors
Custom Selectors
DOM Traversal Methods
Accessing DOM Elements
Summary
Events—How to Pull the Trigger Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Events—How to Pull the Trigger
Performing Tasks on Page Load
Simple Events
Compound Events
Limiting and Ending Events
Simulating User Interaction
Summary
Effects—How to Add Flair to Your Actions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Effects—How to Add Flair to Your Actions
Inline CSS Modification
Basic Hide and Show
Effects and Speed
Multiple Effects
Simultaneous versus Queued Effects
In a Nutshell
Summary
DOM Manipulation—How to Change Your Page on Command Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
DOM Manipulation—How to Change Your Page on Command
Manipulating Attributes
Inserting New Elements
Moving Elements
Wrapping Elements
Copying Elements
DOM Manipulation Methods in a Nutshell
Summary
AJAX—How to Make Your Site Buzzword-Compliant Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
AJAX—How to Make Your Site Buzzword-Compliant
Loading Data on Demand
Choosing a Data Format
Passing Data to the Server
Keeping an Eye on the Request
AJAX and Events
Security Limitations
Summary
Table Manipulation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Table Manipulation
Sorting
Pagination
The Finished Code
Advanced Row Striping
Row Highlighting
Tooltips
Collapsing and Expanding
Filtering
The Finished Code
Summary
Forms with Function Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Forms with Function
Progressively Enhanced Form Styling
Form Validation
Checkbox Manipulation
The Finished Code
Placeholder Text for Fields
AJAX Auto-Completion
The Finished Code
Input Masking
Numeric Calculations
Deleting Items
Editing Shipping Information
The Finished Code
Summary
Shufflers and Rotators Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Shufflers and Rotators
Headline Rotator
An Image Carousel
Image Enlargement
The Finished Code
Summary
Plug-ins Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Plug-ins
How to Use a Plug-in
Popular Plug-Ins
Finding Plug-in Documentation
Developing a Plug-in
Summary

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