Monday, October 20, 2008

Experimenting with jQuery

I've done a little experimentation with jQuery while building out geoffreywiseman.ca.  I've been meaning to get a little deeper into AJAX and jQuery was one of the libraries that appealed to me.  It went pretty well for the most part, although I'm not yet sure if it took me less time to learn jQuery than it would have taken me to do the work by hand with JavaScript.  Seems pretty powerful as a library, though.


I did some experimentation with jQuery animations, but quickly discovered that it wasn't going to do the job for me -- you can roll over the icons faster than the animations typically run, and it's very difficult to get a set of animations happening in sequence, cancelling each other without tripping over your own feet, so I dropped the animations.

Even then, I was pleased to realize that I could accomplish this all in presumably cross-browser code without having to test in all these browsers.  Out of curiosity, I fired up IE7 this morning, only to discover that although the site works well in Chrome and Firefox, it's got problems in IE7. 

Ah, browsers.   Can't code web-apps without 'em, can't kill the vendors who wrote such incompatible clients without getting arrested.  This is one of the things that had me focus on server-side code for most of my career.  I'm hoping there's an easy fix.

1 comment:

Geoffrey Wiseman said...

Problems of my own making - a doctype later and taking out some XML-derived XHTML singleton tags (e.g. <span id="generateHere" />) and voila, working in IE.