Usability / Accessibility Tutorials
Form Element AJAX Spinner Attachment Using MooTools
Many times you'll see a form dynamically change available values based on the value of a form field. For example, a "State" field will change based on which Country a user selects. What annoys me about these forms is that they'll often do an...
Highlight Table Rows, Columns, and Cells Using MooTools 1.2.3
Row highlighting and individual cell highlighting in tables is pretty simple in every browser that supports :hover on all elements (basically everything except IE6). Column highlighting is a bit more difficult. Luckily MooTools 1.2.3 makes the process easy. The XHTML A normal table. The cells...
Select Dropdowns, MooTools, and CSS Print
I know I've harped on this over and over again but it's important to enhance pages for print. You can do some things using simple CSS but today's post features MooTools and jQuery. We'll be taking the options of a SELECT element and generating...
QuickBoxes for Dojo
Adding to my mental portfolio is important to me. First came MooTools, then jQuery, and now Dojo. I speak often with Peter Higgins of Dojo fame and decided it was time to step into his world. I chose a simple but useful plugin...
Adding Events to Adding Events in jQuery
Earlier this week I posted a usability tip about using CSS and MooTools' custom event functionality to automatically add the "pointer" cursor when an element gets a "click" event attached to it. I received numerous requests for a jQuery version and I think I've...
Adding Events to Adding Events in MooTools
Note: This post has been updated. One of my huge web peeves is when an element has click events attached to it but the element doesn't sport the "pointer" cursor. I mean how the hell is the user supposed to know they can/should click on...
PHPTVDB: Using PHP to Retrieve TV Show Information
I'm a bigtime TV/movie buff. If it's ever seen the light of day on HBO or BBC America, I've seen it (and quite possibly filmed my own made-for-TV-short-film). Unfortunately IMDB doesn't provide an official API for movies and TV shows but thankfully
Fixing sIFR Printing with CSS and MooTools
While I'm not a huge sIFR advocate I can understand its allure. A customer recently asked us to implement sIFR on their website but I ran into a problem: the sIFR headings wouldn't print because they were Flash objects. Here's how to fix...
jQuery topLink Plugin
Last week I released a snippet of code for MooTools that allowed you to fade in and out a "to the top" link on any page. Here's how to implement that functionality using jQuery. The XHTML A simple link. The CSS A little CSS for position and style. The jQuery...
“Top” Watermark Using MooTools
Whenever you have a long page worth of content, you generally want to add a "top" anchor link at the bottom of the page so that your user doesn't have to scroll forever to get to the top. The only problem with this method is...