Design By Tim

Congrats to the jQuery team - This is a massive new release of jQuery that’s been a long time in the making - and it’s ready for your consumption!

It’s chock full of new features (and probably bugs)

• Selectors
  •  :has(selector)
  •  :header
  •  :animated
  • XPath Selector Plugin
• Attributes
  • .val() Overhaul
• Traversing
  • .map()
  • .prevAll() / .nextAll()
  • .slice()
  • .hasClass()
  • .andSelf()
  • .contents()
• Manipulation
  • .wrapInner() / .wrapAll()
  • .replaceWith() / .replaceAll()
  • Event Cloning
• CSS
  • .offset()
  • .height() / .width() for document and window

• Ajax
  • Partial .load()
  • Cross-Domain getScript
  • JSONP
  • .serialize() Overhaul
  • Disable Caching
• Effects
  • .stop()
  • %/em Animations
  • Color Animations
  • Relative Animations
  • Queue Control
  •  :animated
  • step: Function
• Events
  • Namespaced Events
  • .triggerHandler()
• Internals
  • Documentation Move
  • Expando Management

Get you some Visual jQuery. It’s a “new” tool I found today, it was created and maintained by Yehuda Katz  - their bio states: “I am a core member of the jQuery team, working on evangelism and plugin management.”

Now, in reality this isn’t something that will solve world peace or even stop the war in Iraq, but it will help beginners see every aspect of any feature in jQuery. Which in turn could lead to solving world peace.  Now if you’ve just entered the fray and have no clue how jQuery solves world peace - why don’t you just read up on it then (official jQuery site).

I have no qualms of throwing a debate together about jQuery against Prototype. However Why jQuery’s Philosophy is Better does such a better job than I could. Not to leave out the rebuttal this is a well thought out approach to why JQuery: (Mis)leading the Pack.

What are your thoughts on the subject?

Recently I have been developing form validation in JavaScript. Due to the development environment I have learned some new techniques that I am fine tuning in my validation process.

Here are my requirements for this JavaScript to work:

• Reusable across multiple forms.
• No bloat, bandwidth intensive or memory hogging.
• Easy to implement.
• Not required for the site to operate but allow for required fields.

These are features I would like to use or see:

• It should be able to customize on-the-fly dialog for messages.
• It would be nice to have “skinable” dialog for multiple languages or use the same validation for mutliple locations.
• Multiple case scenarios adding custom cases or ability to add “modular” (plug-in) abilities for validation.

The goal is to have an optimized solution that uses reusable elements to eliminate the need of creating client side validation scripts again and again for each project. In short I want a flexible JavaScript form validator. And since I won’t be able to use any of this in my day job I think I will give you a free shot of form validation. Please post your own methods and uses I would love to have variations and thoughts on these methods.

Preperation
The usability is often determined by a good information architecture, clear and intuitive visual design and well designed functionality. One of the main arguments to enhance markup using unobtrusive JavaScript is to improve the usability of a Web page by supporting these usability attributes. This attempt of this script will be to enhance the usability of a Web page by allowing the form designer to not worry about the script rather the layout and presentation to the end user.

I would love to see this done without any frameworks used however - if one must - I will accept jQuery, Prototype or any other major JS framework freely available.

While looking around for usage and performance examples of application configuration should come from a database or file system. I found an interesting example between the pros and cons of each. So whipped out the trusty IDE (PHP Eclipse) and whipped up this simple addition to the core of CI.

Since my code view seems to be crapping out at the moment I will link to the amazing code on the official wiki.