- Learning Web Scripting Basics
- How JavaScript Fits into a Web Page
- Exploring JavaScript's Capabilities
- Displaying Time with JavaScript
- Testing the Script
- Summary
- Q & A
- Workshop
- Exercises
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Exploring JavaScript’s Capabilities
If you’ve spent any time browsing the Web, you’ve undoubtedly seen lots of examples of JavaScript in action. The following sections provide some brief descriptions of typical applications for JavaScript, all of which you’ll explore in later lessons.
Improving Navigation
Some of the most common uses of JavaScript are in navigation systems for websites. You can use JavaScript to create a navigation tool—for example, a drop-down menu to select the next page to read or a submenu that pops up when you hover over a navigation link.
When it’s done right, this kind of JavaScript interactivity can make a site easier to use, even for browsers that don’t support JavaScript.
Validating Forms
Form validation is another common use of JavaScript, although the form validation features of HTML5 have stolen a lot of JavaScript’s thunder here as well. A simple script can read values the user types into a form and make sure they’re in the right format, such as with zip codes, phone numbers, and email addresses. This type of client-side validation enables users to fix common errors without waiting for a response from the web server, telling them that their form submission was invalid. You’ll learn how to work with form data in Lesson 27, “Working with Web-Based Forms.”
Special Effects
One of the earliest and most annoying uses of JavaScript was to create attention-getting special effects—for example, scrolling a message in the browser’s status line or flashing the background color of a page.
These techniques have fortunately fallen out of style, but thanks to the W3C DOM and the latest browsers, some more impressive effects are possible with JavaScript—for example, creating objects that can be dragged and dropped on a page or creating fading transitions between images in a slideshow. Some developers have HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript working in tandem to create fully functioning interactive games.
Remote Scripting (AJAX)
For a long time, the biggest limitation of JavaScript was that there was no way for it to communicate with a web server. For example, you could use JavaScript to verify that a phone number had the right number of digits but not to look up the user’s location in a database based on the number.
Now that most browsers support some of JavaScript’s advanced features, this is no longer the case. Your scripts can get data from a server without loading a page, or they can send data back to be saved. These features are collectively known as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or remote scripting.