When creating new elements (or selecting existing ones), jQuery returns the elements in a collection. Many developers new to jQuery assume that this collection is an array. It has a zero-indexed sequence of DOM elements, some familiar array functions, and a .length property, after all. Actually, the jQuery object is more complicated than that. link … Continue reading →

link Provide Public Access to Default Plugin SettingsAn improvement we can, and should, make to the code above is to expose the default plugin settings. This is important because it makes it very easy for plugin users to override/customize the plugin with minimal code. And this is where we begin to take advantage of the … Continue reading →

Sometimes you want to make a piece of functionality available throughout your code. For example, perhaps you want a single method you can call on a jQuery selection that performs a series of operations on the selection. In this case, you may want to write a plugin. link How jQuery Works 101: jQuery Object MethodsBefore … Continue reading →

link Custom EventsWe're all familiar with the basic events — click, mouseover, focus, blur, submit, etc. — that we can latch on to as a user interacts with the browser. Custom events open up a whole new world of event-driven programming. It can be difficult at first to understand why you'd want to use custom … Continue reading →

link IntroductionWeb pages are all about interaction. Users perform a countless number of actions such as moving their mice over the page, clicking on elements, and typing in textboxes — all of these are examples of events. In addition to these user events, there are a slew of others that occur, like when the page … Continue reading →