Advancing JavaScript with Libraries

This is a presentation that I recently gave at Yahoo for a number of their developers. It was on the importance of JavaScript Libraries, and how their introduction and use changes how JavaScript development works.

Specifically, I discuss some of what I’ve learned from developing, and working with the users of, jQuery and developing the new FUEL library for Firefox 3.

Advancing JavaScript with Libraries (Part 1)

Advancing JavaScript with Libraries (Part 2)

Materials and Links:

• Presentation Files (PDF)
• jQuery JavaScript Library
• FUEL Extension Library
• “jQuery2” A meta-language for jQuery

Discussed Elsewhere:

• Summary on that Yahoo UI Blog
• Transcript and notes on Ajaxian
• Same information, but on Mozilla’s Developer Wiki

Posted: April 24th, 2007

4 Comments (Show Comments)

1. Dao (April 24, 2007 at 5:58 pm)

   Nice. I’m not quite through it, but two notes so far:

   – a boolean value set as an attribute will be converted to a string, so foo.setAttribute(“disabled”, false); results in disabled=”false”. And an element is disabled as soon as the attribute is present, so … yeah, irritating at first, but it kind of makes sense.
   – contrary to foo.class = “bar”, foo.setAttribute(“class”, “bar”) does work.

2. Dao (April 24, 2007 at 6:24 pm)

   – this picks even table rows in CSS3: tr:nth-child(2n)
   http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-selectors/#nth-child-pseudo
   – when mixing CSS3 and XPath as in $(“ul[ul]”), how do you differentiate a list that contains a list from a list that has an “ul” attribute?

3. Bradley (April 25, 2007 at 6:54 am)

   Unordered list with ul attribute:
   $(‘ul[@ul]’)

   Unordered list with another inside:
   $(‘ul ul’)

   Unordered list with another as a direct descendant:
   $(‘ul > ul’)

   Of course, the last one would be illegal (X)HTML Strict (Transitional too?). More selectors here: http://docs.jquery.com/DOM/Traversing/Selectors

4. Jordan Sissel (May 1, 2007 at 1:32 pm)

   I think what John was pointing out about ul[ul] only being valid in xpath, as there’s no way to specify predicates about child elements, only predicates about node attributes, iirc.

   Things in [] are predicates/assertions, not selectors, in xpath. So, ul[ul] would say “match me a ul element that has a child somewhere that is also a ul”

   CSS ‘ul ul’ is not the same as XPATH ‘ul[ul]’
   CSS ‘ul ul’ is the same as XPATH ‘ul/ul’

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