Yes, this is another round-up of fresh and useful Javascript techniques, tools and resources. But don’t close the tab yet, as you might find this one very useful. In this selection we present calendars, forms, buttons, navigation, debugging, optimization and compatibility tables as well as handy resources and tools. We also cover various jQuery-plugins that will help you extend the functionality of your website and improve user experience with ready components or coding solutions.

The last section also covers a number of useful educational resources such as a compilation of useful JavaScript coding practices, a detailed comparison of JavaScript frameworks and general JavaScript programming conventions. We are looking forward to your feedback.

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Fresh JavaScript Tools That Will Improve Your Workflow
• 45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript-Techniques
• 70 Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

[By the way: The network tab (on the top of the page) is updated several times a day. It features manually selected articles from the best web design blogs!]

Calendars and Timelines

jDigiClock – Digital Clock (HTC Hero inspired)
jDigiClock is a jQuery plugin inspired from HTC Hero Clock Widget.

jQuery Sliding Clock v1.1
jQuery transpearant Slider clock with CSS sprites.

Date / Time Picker
Note that this control is not designed to work in IE6; although it will function correctly in most cases, the positioning of the calendar may be way off depending on how your page is styled.

JavaScript Debugging and Validation Tools

Venkman JavaScript Debugger project page
Venkman is the code name for Mozilla’s JavaScript Debugger. Venkman aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Gecko-based browsers namely Firefox 3.x, the Netscape 7.x series of browsers, Netscape 9.x series, Mozilla Seamonkey 1.x and Mozilla Seamonkey 2.x. It does not include Gecko-based browsers such as K-Meleon 1.x, Galeon 2.x and Netscape 8.x. The debugger is available as an add-on package in XPI format. Venkman JavaScript Debugger has been provided as part of the Mozilla install distribution since October 3rd 2001.

CompanionJS
Companion.JS (pronounced Companion dot JS or CJS) is a Javascript debugger for IE.

How to Test your JavaScript Code with QUnit
QUnit is a powerful JavaScript unit testing framework that helps you to debug code. It’s written by members of the jQuery team, and is the official test suite for jQuery. But QUnit is general enough to test any regular JavaScript code, and it’s even able to test server-side JavaScript via some JavaScript engine like Rhino or V8.

JS Bin – Collaborative JavaScript Debugging
JS Bin is an open source collaborative JavaScript debugging tool.

Forms, Buttons & Navigation

Making a Google Wave History Slider
Here is shown how to create a Google Wave-like history slider. Using it will enable visitors to go back and forth in time to view the changes that take place on a comment thread.

Fancy Radio Buttons With jQuery
Creation of 2 mandatory option sets that a user could choose, while hiding off the radio button inputs and using an anchor links to make it a bit more usable.

Creative Button Animations with Sprites and JQuery
Fading hover effect for which the transition is smoothed with JavaScript, using jQuery library.

Password (un)Masking
JavaScript jQuery that toggles the masking and unmasking of the password field.

jQuery MagicLine Navigation
These “sliding” style navigation bars have been around a while, and turns out it’s really pretty darn easy. Here are put two examples together.

Fixed Fade Out Menu: A CSS and jQuery Tutorial
The aim is to have a fixed navigation that follows the user when he scrolls, and only subtly showing itself by fading out and becoming almost transparent. When the user hovers over it, the menu then becomes opaque again. Inside of the navigation we will have some links, a search input and a top and bottom button that let the user navigate to the top or the bottom of the page.

jQuery plugin: Simplest Twitter-like dynamic character count for textareas and input fields
The best way to explain what this plugin does is to mention Twitter. Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters. While typing the Twitter post there is this always present information about how many characters the users have before reaching the limit. The information is not only provided merely by displaying a number, there are different colors applied to certain stages to notify the user about the status.

Sliding Labels v2
Form label keeping the label inline, but sliding it off to the left rather than going away on click.

Ketchup Plugin
Ketchup is a slim jQuery Plugin that validates your forms. It aims to be very flexible and extendable for its appearance and functionality.

Layout tools

jQuery {css}designerGrid Plugin
{css} designerGrid is A jQuery Plugin developed for website interface developers who use the grid system of layout. {css} designerGrid is intended to assist these developers with CSS prototyping.

css-template-layout
JavaScript (jQuery) implementation of the CSS Template Layout Module

How to create a fluid grid with jQuery
Grid-based layout is probably the more preferred way to style up a webpage to give it more magazine-like look and feel. This tutorial is about how to use CSS and Javascript to create a fluid grid-based layout (See demo here). The algorithm/procedure used in this tutorial is very simple and straightforward. There are more advanced algorithms out there which can handle multiple scenarios. But the purpose is to understand the basic logic on how to create such layout. So here it goes…

closure-templates
Closure Templates are a client- and server-side templating system that helps you dynamically build reusable HTML and UI elements. They are easy to learn and customizable to fit your application’s needs. Closure Templates support JavaScript and Java and use a data model and expression syntax that works for either language. You can also use the built-in message support to easily localize your applications.

Useful jQuery Plugins

TipTip jQuery Plugin
TipTip detects the edges of the browser window and will make sure the tooltip stays within the current window size. As a result the tooltip will adjust itself to be displayed above, below, to the left or to the right of the element with TipTip applied to it, depending on what is necessary to stay within the browser window. TipTip is a very lightweight and intelligent custom tooltip jQuery plugin. It uses ZERO images and is completely customizable via CSS. It’s also only 3.5kb minified!

jQuery Roundabout
Roundabout is a jQuery plugin that converts a structure of static HTML elements into a highly customizable turntable-like interactive area. (And now, not just turntables, but many shapes!)

jParse – jQuery XML Parse Plugin
jParse is a jQuery plugin that allows you to parse XML that was fetched with the jQuery .ajax method (making it fully customizable).

jQuery Quicksand plugin
Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation.

typeQuery, change website typography with jquery
typeQuery gives the flexibility to change the font-family for everything you define with class, id, or tag, this example is referring to the selected item on a select object with id=”tag” and the font-family value at select object with id=”family”: $($("#tag").val()).css("font-family", $("#family").val());

Flip! A jQuery plugin v0.9.9
Flip is a jQuery plugin that will flip easily your elements in four directions.

Data Encryption With JavaScript: jCryption
jCryption is a jQuery plugin for encrypting POST/GET data submitted by forms. It uses public-key algorithm of RSA for the encryption & has a PHP file for handling the decryption of data.

Minimalist jQuery: 11 useful plugins under 4K
jQuery makes our lives easier. So much so that it’s tempting to use it all the time, inadvertently slowing our page load times (cue YSlow and Hammerhead). Combining, compressing, and delivering scripts at the end of your page helps in the HTTP request department. On the file size front, below are jQuery plugins that give solid bang for your performance buck.

Undo/Redo in jQuery
An easy-to-use plugin for adding undo/redo capabilities to a jQuery application. It is based loosely on the Objective-C/Cocoa way of doing things.

editease
editEase – jQuery CMS | no fuss, no database, no worries

jsHub
jsHub is a single piece of JavaScript (a “tag”) that can handle reading different sorts of page information and then send them to many different vendors’ products. One piece of code to send to Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends and Mixpanel. Instead of one piece of JavaScript per vendor, jsHub has a single piece of code (the “hub”) and plugins that know how to translate into the required wire protocol for each vendor. Vendors only maintain the plugin for their product.

Educational JavaScript Resources and Tutorials

Caffeinated Simpleton
JavaScript is an amazing little language, but it’s got some quirks that turn a lot of people off. One of those quirks is this, and how it’s not necessarily what you expect it to be. this isn’t that complicated, but there are very few explanations of how it works on the internet. This article is an attempt to explain how this works and how to use it properly.

What You Need To Know About JavaScript Scope
This article discusses how JavaScript handles scope and how various JavaScript libraries provide methods for dealing with it and how they smooth out a few bumps. We’ll also look at how you can get back to basics and do some interesting scope wrangling without a library, a useful approach if you’re writing code that needs to stand alone.

Learning Advanced JavaScript
A very nice tutorial to learn JavaScript, containing code and discussion from the upcoming book Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja by John Resig.

Highlight search terms automagically with JavaScript and mark
Script surrounding the search term(s) with the mark element rather than a span, although the class searchword is retained in case you want to style these marks differently from others. In the CSS, the rule article mark is just added to turn it a gentle shade of pink.

10 Really Helpful Traversing Functions in jQuery
With jQuery, selecting HTML elements is laughably easy. But at times, we may wish to further refine the selection, which can be a hassle when the HTML structure is complicated. In this tutorial, we’ll explore ten ways that we can refine and extend a set of wrapped elements that we wish to operate upon.

Using keyboard shortcuts in Javascript
If you want to enhance your web app, Javascript keyboards shortcuts is definitely something to consider. In this article, you’ll learn to use JS keyboard shortcuts, with and without the JQuery framework.

Code Conventions for the JavaScript Programming Language
This is a set of coding conventions and rules for use in JavaScript programming.

jQuery – Select element cheat sheet
This cheat sheet helps you to find the index of a selected option, set the selected option by value, set the selected option by text, insert a new option before or after another and get the text or value of the selected option.

Compare JavaScript frameworks
Modern Web sites and Web applications tend to rely quite heavily on client-side JavaScript to provide rich interactivity, particularly through the advent of asynchronous HTTP requests that do not require page refreshes to return data or responses from a server-side script or database system. In this article, you will discover how JavaScript frameworks make it easier and faster to create highly interactive and responsive Web sites and Web applications.

Park your Horse, Code Cowboy: Professional JavaScript Workflows, Part 1
In this series, we’ll talk about tools & techniques you can use to cover those No’s, and cut a lot of strife & embarrassment from your JavaScript experience.

JavaScript Reference examples (example source code)
JavaScript Reference examples, organized by Objects, Properties, Methods & Collections. Some Event Handlers Reference are also available.

JavaScript best practices
A compilation of best practices and good advice I’ve amassed over the years, much of it learnt the hard way (experimentation and suchlike). Take the advice below to heart and keep it in a part of your brain that has a quick access route so you can apply it without thinking about it. I am sure you will find things to disagree with, and that is a good thing – you should question what you read, and strive to find better solutions. However, I have found that following these principles has made me a more effective developer and allowed other developers to build upon my work more easily.

wtfjs
JavaScript is a language we love despite it giving us so much to hate. This is a collection of those very special irregularities, inconstancies and just plain painfully unintuitive moments for the language of the web.

Related Posts

You may be interested in the following related posts:

• 50 Fresh JavaScript Tools That Will Improve Your Workflow
• 45 Powerful CSS/JavaScript-Techniques
• 70 Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

Poll

What programming language should we cover in next round-up?surveys

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 63 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: AJAX, javascript, jquery

CSS and JavaScript are extremely powerful tools for designers and developers. However, sometimes it’s difficult to come up with the one excellent idea that would solve a problem that you are facing right now. Good news: almost every day designers and developers come up with fresh and clever CSS tricks and techniques and share them with other developers online. We regularly collect all these tricks, filter them, sort them, revise them and prepare them for Smashing Magazine readers.

In this post we present 45 useful CSS/JavaScript-techniques that may help you find clever solutions to some of your problems or just get inspired by what is possible with CSS. We cover interesting CSS-techniques, navigation menus, CSS typography, CSS lists and CSS buttons. The focus of this post lies on CSS; please notice that some of the techniques use JavaScript or PHP for enhanced functionality.

Please notice that this is the first part of our large round-up of fresh CSS/JavaScript-techniques. Other techniques (CSS tables, CSS layouts, CSS for Mobile and CSS forms) will be featured in an upcoming article. So don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter for similar articles and a stream of useful resources. Please also let us know what we should change or improve in our future posts!

We are aware that many readers are tired of “lists” floating around in the Web, but we are confident that the vast majority of our visitors will benefit from this post format and will find at least some of the techniques featured in this post useful.

By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has one of the most influential and popular Twitter accounts? Join our discussions and get updates about useful tools and resources — follow us on Twitter.

Interesting CSS Techniques

Building the New Visual Annotations
These note overlays are composed of two main elements, an overlay with the shine and a border with the transparency. A very interesting, yet simple technique by the ZURB Design Agency, designers who have written a series of articles on Smashing Magazine as well.

Sexy Music Album Overlays
This aticle shows how to style your music streams and provides you some graphics to do so.

A Colorful Clock With CSS & jQuery
This tutorial describes how one can create a clock using basic CSS and JavaScript.

How To Create Depth And Nice 3D Ribbons Only Using CSS3
We will use box-shadow to create a drop-shadow with RGBa, a color model that allows an optimized contrast with any kind of backgrounds. RGBa is the standard RGB model (0,0,0 – 255,255,255) and it adds the last option (a) for the opacity. We can use this model also for other properties and it works with the new browser.

Advanced Event Timeline With PHP, CSS & jQuery
This Advanced Event Timeline is used with the help of PHP, MySQL, CSS and jQuery. The result: a nice time line with clickable events. Adding new ones is going to be as easy as inserting a row in the database.

CSS Navigation Menus

CSS 3D Meninas
“I’ve took the classic paint The Maids of Honour (Las Meninas) and created a CSS pseudo-3D / Parallax effect. It is pure CSS, no JavaScript or Flash is involved. It has been tested and is working on Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Opera 9, Safari 3, Chrome 4 and Konqueror 3.5, and it validates, too.

Sproing! – Make An Elastic Thumbnail Menu
“In an ongoing attempt to offer alternative methods to spruce up menus, I’ve pieced together an elastic thumbnail menu. It magnifies menu items when they are hovered over and menu items expand upwards.

How to Create Simple and Effective Sub Navs with Definition Lists
“When we need simple and effective on-page navigation, to either jump to content on the page or flip to another view, we use the dl element. Its sub elements, the dt and dd, make it very easy for us to create inline links with a clear label. Here we’re going to share with you a fast, lightweight method for how we’ll use CSS to do it.”

Sticky SideNav Layout with CSS
Learn how to create a fixed sidenav layout for your blog or website. Having a fixed sidenav comes in handy when dealing with blog style websites where the content is extremely tall and there is a need for good amount of scrolling. The fixed navigation allows the user to cruise through the content without scrolling back up to the top to navigate through the rest of the site.

Unobtrusive Dropdown Page Changer
Using a <select> dropdown menu to create navigation isn’t as common as it once was, but it’s still around. It got ripped on pretty good for being an inaccessible / obtrusive. Indeed a lot of the scripts you’ll find out there for creating a menu like this are this way. Bummer. Let’s make one that works with or without JavaScript.

CSS Navigation: No JavaScript, jQuery or Image Required, Free CSS Navigation / Pagination with Tooltip
CSS-based navigation / pagination bar without JavaScript. There is a tooltip on hover for the ‘previous’ and ‘next’ page’s bullets that makes navigation easier.

How to Code an Overlapping Tabbed Main Menu
Main navigation menu is that part of a website design that makes the whole site look lively and complete. But the most common type of navigation menu style still being used a lot is the tabbed navigation menu. Here is a tutorial on how to code an overlapping tabbed menu.

Solution For Very Long Dropdown Menus
“I like to be confident with post titles, but the reality in this case is a possible solution for very long dropdowns. The problem with long dropdowns is that the dropdown itself can go below the “fold” of the website. That is, below the visible area of the browser window. So in order to access those menu items down below, you need to scroll your browser window. For those of us with scroll wheels of some kind on our mice (mouses?), it’s not a big deal. For those without, those lower menu items are totally inaccessible, because to use the browser scrollbar means mousing off the menu (and probably having it close).”

Mega Drop Down Menu w/ CSS & jQuery
When used properly, mega drop down menus can be quite efficient for large scale websites. Let’s experiment with different ways of implementing this technique. A tutorial by Soh Tanaka, Smashing Magazine’s regular author.

CSS Typography and Body Copy

How to Create a Cool Anaglyphic Text Effect with CSS
Anaglyphs are those amazing 3D images that are created by offsetting two of the red, green and blue channels, and are viewed with those nerdy looking 3D glasses with different coloured lenses. I don’t know if this effect works for real, as I’ve unfortunately misplaced my 3D specs, but it’s a pretty cool text effect nevertheless! Let’s take a look at how a similar style can be created for sprucing up your web designs, while taking into consideration semantics and avoiding the repetition of any markup.

Typographic work planner
Enter this, a little HTML/CSS typographic work planner. By using some super-semantic HTML and a dash of CSS you can craft a beautiful looking yet incredibly simple work planner for you and your staff.

Thinning Text in Webkit (Safari)
Safari has a not-so-lovely way of bulking up text using sub-pixel rendering. On previous versions of Safari, this was fixed with a text-shadow declaration, but since Snow Leopard that method no longer works. Fortunately, there is an alternative.

Pseudo Drop Caps
They’ve been around for a while now, appearing in magazines, print and now the web. Designers and developers alike have experimented with multiple workarounds from using inline styles to using image replacement but with both of these solutions there are problems. For example, what happens when you recreate your site and decide that you no longer want to upload the drop cap images, you’re now going to left with a broken image at the start of every single post that you had previously created, this is obviously assuming you haven’t used text-indent. If you decided to go down on the inline style route then your are just bad, just very bad.

How to Create Perfect Pre Tags
If you operate a website that features lots of code examples, you know how important it is to spend some quality time styling the &tl;pre> element. When left unstyled, wild <pre> tags will mangle your preformatted content and destroy your site’s layout. Different browsers treat the <pre> tag quite differently, varying greatly in their default handling of font-sizing, scrollbar-rendering, and word-wrapping. Indeed, getting your preformatted code to look consistent, usable, and stylish across browsers is no easy task, but it certainly can be done. This article explains everything you need to create proper <pre> tags.

Improve your web typography with baseline shift
The baseline is an invisible line onto which all type characters sit, although of course some characters (including ‘j’, ‘p’, ‘g’ and ‘y’) have descenders that hang below the baseline. Baseline shift involves moving characters up or down in relation to the baseline and using it effectively can make a huge difference to the professional look of your type. Although baseline shift has traditionally been a part of using tools like InDesign or Quark, there are ways to accomplish the same results using CSS.

Typograph – Scale & Rhythm
This page is both an essay and a tool. It sets out to explore how two, intertwined concepts, often playful but sometimes cheeky, can be encouraged to dance in web pages. Drag the colored boxes along the scale to throw these words anew. For the most part, this text is just a libretto for the performance you are about to play upon it.

Fancy Quotes With jQuery, AJAX & CSS
Learn how to create a fancy quote rating system that will display a number of famous quotes and will enable site visitors to rate their favorites.

How To Create Simple, Stylish and Swappable Image Captions
Most image caption solutions require a lot of excessive HTML, make it difficult to redesign or don’t communicate clearly that they belong to an image. Let’s see what we can do to address these problems.

Styling photo captions with CSS
Sure, some photos are self-explanatory, but most photos are best served with text captions. It’s true for traditional media like newspapers and magazines, and just as true for blog posts and web articles. Here’s a quick tip on using photo captions and styling them nicely with the magic of CSS.

Image captions on Web pages
This document suggests three ways of presenting an image with a caption in HTML. Styling in CSS is also discussed.

Styling Post Headings That Stick Out
“Recently, I’ve noticed a trend in blog post headings where it sticks out of its base layout. I would like to share this technique for those who would like to give their post headings a new style. One tip to keep in mind when designing this is to make sure it fits your target audience screen resolution size. Note that this technique may vary depending on your design. My goal is for you to grasp the main concept in this tutorial so you can experiment and apply it to your own projects.”

Using ellipsis with HTML and CSS
If the text is too wide to fit into a container, a nice solution can be to have ellipsis to show there’s more information available. While not currently part of the official HTML specifications, it is possible to have ellipsis defined in CSS and it works for Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Opera. It doesn’t work for Firefox but there’s a workaround that can be done with jQuery.

5 Message Boxes to Style your Notifications with CSS
This article presents free notification boxes to use/customize as well as a very simple technique to create your own ones inspired from this roundup.

CSS Lists

Create a Microsoft Word-Style Outline with CSS
As you can see, the browser doesn’t bother to vary the indentation style much, or change the list type from roman numerals to alphabetical characters and so on… all the things we’re so used to seeing because Microsoft Word and other writing programs do them by default. So let’s use a bit of CSS ingenuity to make a Microsoft Word-styled outline using ordered lists!

Pure CSS Timeline
“I wanted to build a CSS timeline for the “About” section of my site while using some clean and simple markup. I wanted to avoid using images as much as possible, so I spent a few minutes prototyping some options and came up with a solution using unordered lists. The result is a simple and clean looking timeline with some very straight forward markup. In this article I’ll share my approach to creating a timeline out of CSS and HTML which results in a nice looking, simple timeline.”

Automatic numbering with CSS Counters
When writing documents, it is often useful to number sections and have a table of contents. You can number these by hand, directly in the markup, but this can be time consuming if the order changes and you have to edit all the numbers. CSS2.1 gives us a automated way to generate numbers using CSS counters, and this article will walk you through how to use them. One word of note before we start is that CSS counters are not yet implemented in IE, although they are on the roadmap for IE8.

CSS tricks for custom bullets

Elastic Calendar Styling with CSS
A traditional calendar is a grid of numbered boxes on a page. As a web designer, you might go right for a table, and I wouldn’t fault you for that. Tables, though, can sometimes be tough to muscle into shape. The CSS purist in me gets pissed when I set the width of a table (or a cell) and it decides it knows better and grows or shrinks as it sees fit.
You can tackle calendar styling with pure CSS, and I feel it makes just as much sense semantically as a table does. What is a calender, if not an ordered list of days? By using CSS, we can even do some cool things like do all our sizing with ems so our calendar layout will be elastic. That is, grow in both width and height when text is resized in browsers, while greatly increasing accessibility.

Style a List with One Pixel
A one-pixel background image can be a pretty versatile thing. With repeat-x it can be a horizontal line, repeat-y makes a vertical line, and repeat makes it a fill color. Just as a little fun proof of concept, we can use that to create a depth-chart looking unordered list.

Style Your Ordered List
By default, most browsers display the ordered list numbers same font style as the body text. Here is a quick CSS tutorial on how you can use the ordered list (ol) and paragraph (p) element to design a stylish numbered list.

Simulating a Table Using an Unordered List
Your first question immediately might be, “why would I want to simulate a table with a list, why not just use a table?” With the raise in popularity of AJAX sortable list elements, using list items to represent a multiple column data table can allow for easy sorting of various more “tabley” information. So let’s get started.

8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS
“The use of HTML lists (<ol> for an ordered list, <ul> for an unordered list) is very common these days. Today, we’re going to look a little bit further than creating regular lists, by showing 8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS. We’ll use some pure CSS techniques to make a bored list look awesome (and even have some extra functionality).”

Quick Tip – Simplify List Margins with CSS
Have you ever set default margins for a layout, and then had to go back and manually adjust all of your lists? By default, list item markers have a negative positioning in relationship to the list item itself. This means that zero-ing out margins automatically leads to an overflow if the list is contained inside anything else. Wouldn’t it be easier to put the list item marker at the same starting point as other elements instead? Lucky for us, there’s a style to help do just that. Let’s see what can be done with the list-style-position property.

Sexy HTML List Tricks
Behold the ubiquitous list elements, <ul> and <ol>. These two sexy elements help millions of websites display lists of information in clean, semantic fashion. Without them, we’d be crawling around like filthy cavemen, eating dirt and howling at the moon. But these list elements aren’t just sexy, they are also extremely flexible, enabling us humble designers to create robust list configurations that are semantically versatile and highly customizable.

Clickable <li>
I originally coded the markup to be a table, but discovered a problem when I tried to make the whole row clickable. I ended up with a list of articles instead.

CSS Buttons

Simply-Buttons v2
This technique presents buttons of the size that always fits the content. There are 3 states: inactive, active and hover. The technique works in all major browsers and doesn’t require JavaScript.

How to make sexy buttons with CSS
This tutorial will teach you how to create pretty looking textual buttons (with alternate pressed state) using CSS. Dynamic buttons save you heaps of time otherwise spent creating graphics and will basically make you a happier person at the end of the day.

Liquid & Color Adjustable CSS Buttons
When working on a large site with multiple buttons, it can be quite tedious to make all the buttons in Photoshop. Making future adjustments on the verbiage and colors can be also be time consuming. By having dynamic buttons, this scenario is much easier to handle, and by having liquid and color adjustable buttons with CSS, we are able to change the verbiage and colors in a flash.

Create a Button with Hover and Active States using CSS Sprites
Too many designers neglect the click state (active-property in CSS) in web design, either because they’re unaware of it, underestimate the importance of it or are plain lazy. It’s a simple effect that improves usability by giving the user some feedback as to what they’ve clicked on but can also add depth to a design.

Recreating the button
“I thought it would be interesting to provide a portion of the background on buttons here, and discuss some of the iterations we’ve been through so far to get to the current state.”

Rounded form buttons

Google’s Imageless Buttons
An interesting discussion about various buttons design techniques to reconstruct Google’s imageless buttons.

Stay tuned!

This is the first part of our large round-up of fresh CSS/JavaScript-techniques. Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter for similar articles and a stream of useful resources. Please also let us know what we should change or improve in our future posts!

Would you like to see more similar round-ups on Smashing Magazine in the future?(answers)

© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 64 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: CSS, javascript, js

I have been very impressed with Andrew Sutherland of the Mozilla Messaging team (which is one reason that I have faith that I will dump Gmail for something he and the Messaging team come up with one day ;) and the visualizations that he is playing with are quite cool indeed. Seeing your email in different ways (not just in a table) can open the eyes.

Andrew is using Protovis “a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots. These primitives are called marks, and each mark encodes data visually through dynamic properties such as color and position.”

There are some cool examples such as:

which produces .

Very cool indeed!

Allan Jardine has updated his popular DataTables rich data grid control. Allan told us what his aims were for this 1.4.1 release:

Being fairly happy with the options that DataTables presents to the end user, I’ve focused this release on providing tools for the developer. A plug-in API, non-destructive DOM manipulation (the biggest weak point of the old versions) and documentation are the major new features.

If you take a look at the new rich API you will see that can manipulate the data in the table, build filters, fetch remote data, and more.

What does DataTables feature again?

• Variable length pagination
• On-the-fly filtering
• Multi-coloum sorting with data type detection
• Smart handling of column widths
• Fully internationalisable
  UK, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Norwegian, Portuguese Brazilian (and more) translations provided
• State saving
• Hidden columns
• Dynamic creation of tables
• Ajax auto loading of data
• Custom DOM positioning
• Single column filtering
• Alternative pagination types
• Non-destructive DOM interaction
• Sorting column(s) highlighting
• Extensive plug-in support
  Sorting, type detection, API functions and pagination
• Fully themeable by CSS
• Solid documentation

By Jacob Gube

JavaScript is a powerful client-side scripting language used in many modern websites and Web applications. In the hands of a skilled Web developer, JavaScript can enhance the user’s experience of the website and provide rich interactive components and features. But even though syntactically simple in nature, JavaScript is often difficult to author because of the environment it runs in: the Web browser. JavaScript’s popularity is evident in emerging technologies, such as Adobe AIR, which use it as a supported language for creating desktop-based applications.

Below, you’ll find 50 excellent tools to help you achieve various tasks involved in authoring JavaScript code. You’ll find useful tools to speed up your coding processes, including debugging tools to hunt down places where your scripts break, unit testing and validation tools to test your scripts in various situations, security vulnerability scanners and code optimization tools to make sure your scripts are light as a feather.

You’ll also find a few new and alternative JavaScript and AJAX frameworks to help you explore options beyond the big names (i.e. MooTools, jQuery, YUI, Dojo, Prototype), in addition to useful scripts to help you accomplish a host of design and development tasks related to JavaScript.

Also, be sure to check out the following related posts:

• 75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques
• 60 AJAX- and Javascript Solutions For Professional Coding
• jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices
• 50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools

JavaScript/AJAX Authoring Tools

• jQuery UI
  The jQuery UI allows you to design custom user interfaces for Web applications using the jQuery library. With jQuery UI, you can reduce the amount of code you write for common rich interactive features and website widgets. Be sure to check out the jQuery UI Demo page, which showcases some of the things you can accomplish using jQuery UI.

  

• Google Web Toolkit
  The Google Web Toolkit (commonly referred to as GWT) is a framework for developing complex and fully featured AJAX-based Web applications. You write front-end code in Java that is later compiled into optimized and cross-browser-friendly JavaScript. GWT puts the focus on Web application development by reducing the need for testing and debugging JavaScript for browser quirks.
• Jx
  Jx is a JavaScript library for creating graphical user interfaces written on top of the MooTools framework. Jx is distributed with an MIT license and is well documented. Numerous examples as well as thorough and well-organized API documentation is available on the website.

  

• Freestyle Webtop Toolkit
  Freestyle aims to reduce the complexity and time involved in deploying Web-based user interfaces by eliminating the separation of client-side and server-side development. With Freestyle, you focus on programming logic and UI design, and it handles the rest (i.e. cross-browser compatibility and DHTML and AJAX development).

  

• Script#
  Script# is an AJAX and JavaScript authoring tool that allows developers to write in C#. It also allows .NET developers to leverage their existing knowledge and provides powerful tools associated with the .NET framework.

  

• Aptana Jaxer
  Aptana Jaxer is the first “AJAX server” that allows developers to use their AJAX, HTML, JavaScript and DOM knowledge to create fully featured server-side-powered Web applications. With Jaxer, you can even write database queries in JavaScript syntax. Jaxer integrates very well with popular JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, Dojo and Ext JS.
• JS Regex Generator
  JS Regex Generator helps JavaScript developers write Regular Expressions for matching strings of text. This is commonly done for text-format validation, such as when checking if inputted text has the correct date and email format.

  

• WaveMaker
  WaveMaker is open-source software for complete Web application development and deployment. You can find a host of demo applications built and deployed using WaveMaker on the Demo Applications page.

  

Documentation Tools

• JSDoc Toolkit
  JSDoc Toolkit makes code documentation a breeze. Written in JavaScript, it helps developers automatically generate templates for JavaScript comments. It’s a great tool for managing large-scale applications developed by teams of developers who have different coding styles.
• jGrouseDoc
  jGrouseDoc is an open-source project distributed through Google Code under a modified BSD license. It lets developers document and manage their code comments using a format similar to Javadoc’s.

  

JavaScript Debugging Tools

• Firebug
  Firebug is an extremely popular and well-regarded front-end debugging tool. It has all the features you’d expect from a JavaScript debugging tool, such as the ability to set breakpoints in your code so that you can step through your script. For people developing outside of Mozilla-based browsers, check out Firebug Lite, which is a JavaScript library you can include in your Web pages to access some of the features of Firebug.

  

• Venkman JavaScript Debugger
  Venkman is Mozilla’s JavaScript debugger and an add-on for Gecko-based browsers. Venkman is a robust and fully featured JavaScript debugging environment, with a host of useful features and options, such as code profiling to inspect your script’s performance.

  

• Drosera
  Drosera is an excellent debugging tool for Safari and WebKit-based browsers.

  

• Opera Dragonfly
  Opera Dragonfly is a robust debugging environment for the Opera browser. Dragonfly allows you to view and inspect errors, debug your scripts and inspect and edit the DOM and CSS on the fly.
• NitobiBug
  NitobiBug is a browser-based JavaScript object logger and inspector. It runs on numerous browsers, including IE, Safari, Opera and Firefox. It is a powerful tool in helping developers build rich interactive AJAX applications.
• DebugBar
  DebugBar is an in-browser front-end debugger for Internet Explorer. Much like its Firefox counterparts, it has a robust set of features, such as DOM, JavaScript and cookie inspection. Be sure to check out Companion JS, which is a JavaScript debugging library to be used alongside DebugBar.

  

• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
  Similar to Firebug, IE Developer Toolbar is an in-browser tool to help you debug front-end code in Internet Explorer. It’s especially handy as a debugging and inspection alternative to Firefox when you’re developing and testing in IE.

JavaScript Testing and Validation Tools

• Test – JavaScriptMVC
  Test is a JavaScriptMVC component for easily setting up automated unit testing for JavaScript code. It lets you effectively test for DOM events (such as a key press or form submission), thereby lessening development time, oversight and errors associated with manual testing.

  

• JsUnit
  JsUnit is a popular unit testing framework for JavaScript code. It’s a JavaScript port from another unit testing framework for Java called JUnit. JsUnit allows you to write test cases and provides tools for automated code execution.
• JSLint
  JSLint is a Web-based tool for verifying your JavaScript code for errors. It has a ton of features and settings that you can use to customize verification algorithms to suit your needs.

  

• Crosscheck
  Crosscheck is an open-source testing framework for JavaScript. Crosscheck is unique because it works independent of environment: you can run tests outside of a Web browser, which avoids discrepancies that occur when testing in various browsers.
• YUI Test
  YUI Test is a suite of testing utilities that’s part of the YUI library developed by Yahoo!. It has numerous features, such as easy creation of test cases through an intuitive syntax, advanced failure detection and the ability to organize test cases by grouping them into test suites.

  

• J3Unit
  J3Unit is an excellent object-oriented unit-testing framework for JavaScript. It gives you a host of options for writing automated test cases and has three modes: Static Mode, Local Browser Mode and Remote Browser Mode.
• Regular Expression Tool
  The Regular Expression Tool is an online utility that allows you to test your RegEx code against a sample test. It’s a handy tool to have around when you want to quickly test the efficacy of your regular expressions in a variety of example texts.

  

• JavaScript Regular Expression Tester
  This is another handy tool for testing regular expressions within the Web browser.

  

• JSLitmus
  JSLitmus is a lightweight tool for creating JavaScript benchmarks and performance tests, using an intuitive API.

  

Security Tools

• AttackAPI
  AttackAPI is a framework for writing test cases of potential JavaScript exploits and vulnerabilities.
• jsfuzzer
  jsfuzzer is a fuzzing tool to help you write (and test for) attack vectors in JavaScript.

New and Alternative JavaScript and Ajax Development Frameworks

• Clean AJAX
  Clean AJAX is an open-source framework for creating AJAX-based applications. Check out the demo page to see it in action.

  

• SAJAX
  SAJAX is an excellent toolkit for developing AJAX-based applications. It supports PHP, Perl and Python.

  

• JavaScriptMVC
  JavaScriptMVC is a Web application framework based on the MVC software architectural pattern. It speeds up Web development processes and lays down best practices, maintainability and standards as principles in a project’s development.
• qooxdoo
  qooxdoo is a simple and intuitive AJAX application framework. Be sure to check out the Demo Browser, a Web-based application that allows you to view demos of qooxdoo at work.

  

• SimpleJS
  SimpleJS is a small and lightweight JavaScript library that provides developers with useful JavaScript functions for working with AJAX.

Image Manipulation and Graphing

• Reflection.js
  Reflection.js automatically adds reflections to your images unobtrusively. Also check out instant.js, a similar script that adds an image border and tilts images on a Web page.

  

• typeface.js
  typeface.js allows you to embed custom fonts on Web pages, freeing you from having to create images for HTML text.
• CanvasGraph.js
  CanvasGraph.js is a simple JavaScript library that lets you construct bar, line and pie charts using HTML’s canvas element.

  

• flot
  flot is a JavaScript library for plotting data and has been tested to work in most modern Web browsers.

  

• JavaScript Diagram Builder
  The JavaScript Diagram Builder is a JavaScript library that consists of a variety of objects and functions for constructing diagrams.

  

• The Dojo Charting Engine
  The Dojo Charting Engine is a robust utility for creating components for data visualization, written on top of the Dojo Toolkit.

Useful Utilities and JavaScript Scripts

• Processing.js
  Processing.js is a JavaScript port of Processing, the open-source data-visualization programming language. Check out examples that use Processing.js.
• AJAX Libraries API
  Google’s AJAX Libraries API allows you to serve popular JavaScript libraries using its CDN, which reduces the server load on your website.
• DamnIT
  DamnIT is an error-reporting service that allows you to gather feedback from beta testers after they’ve encountered a JavaScript error. This is perfect for live production testing and as a monitoring tool that helps you track errors and weak spots in your Web applications.
• ie7-js
  ie7-js is a JavaScript library that forces Internet Explorer to behave like a standards-based browser (like Firefox or Opera). It automatically fixes IE browser quirks and deviations from Web standards, as in the case of its box model.
• Lazy loader
  Lazy loader is a jQuery plug-in that delays the loading of images so that text content can load first, thereby making image-heavy pages load faster.

JavaScript Code Optimization and Minification Tools

• JS Minifier
  JS Minifier is a Web-based tool for shrinking your JavaScript code to make it as lightweight as possible.

  

• JSMIN
  JSMIN is a popular JavaScript minifier that removes unneeded characters (like spaces and tabs) and comments, thus reducing your script’s file size.
• YUI Compressor
  The YUI Compressor is another well-regarded JavaScript code-optimization tool developed by Yahoo!.
• Scriptalizer
  Scriptalizer is a helpful online tool for combining JavaScript files to reduce HTTP requests.

  

• ShrinkSafe
  ShrinkSafe is a compression tool that reduces JavaScript file sizes.
• SlickSpeed Selectors Test
  SlickSpeed is a Web page for comparing the performance of the DOM object selection of various popular frameworks like MooTools and jQuery.

  

About the Author

Jacob Gube is a Web developer, designer, and founder of Six Revisions, a blog on Web development and design. If you want to connect with the author, you can follow him on Twitter.

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You may remember Sanjiv Jivan as the GWT-Ext developer that changed over the debacle. He then went on to start work on a GWT version of SmartClient libraries and has now released SmartGWT 1.0.

It is a tour de force of not only a huge widget library, but he explains how it is much more:

So what’s so smart about SmartGWT? Let me try to explain. SmartGWT is not just another Widget library. While most Ajax frameworks focus primarily on presentation and displaying mostly read-only data, either local or via XML / JSON, SmartClient was built with server side integration in mind. Most enterprise applications are not just about about data presentation, but about being able to propagate data changes made by the user to the backend. So while its tempting to use library X that has a cool tree widget, it’s not until you actually try to use it your application that you encounter the real world hard problems. For example, how do you take data from your business objects on the server to not only display in a tree widget, but also be able to update your data model when, say, the user reorders the tree nodes or make edits / deletes in the UI. How do you display hierarchical data where nodes may have hundreds of children? And so on..

Most Ajax frameworks stop short and leave it up to the user to manage state on the client side and propagating the changes to the server. This is not a trivial problem! Over the past few years UI widget libraries have improved significantly and there are now various options available to users. Simply put, having good looking widgets is not the hard problem today. In addition to having good looking widgets, having end-to-end integration of the UI components with the backend is the hard problem. It’s this 20% of the functionality that takes 80% of the time in building most enterprise applications.

The showcase will give you a good feel for what is out there, and it contains some interesting items including:

• Miller Columns: The ColumnTree provides an alternate navigation paradigm for Tree data, sometimes called “Miller Columns” and seen in iTunes
• Nested Grid: A convenient way to display 1-n relationships
• Printable Views: SmartGWT supports printable views of its components.
• Advanced Filter Builder: a databound filter builder.
• Tile View: Representation of data as “tiles”. Again, TileGrid supports data binding so sort / filter and edits can be easily performed.
• Calendars : A Google Calendar like widget that supports databinding so edits and drag drop changes can easily be propgated to the server for persisting.
• TreeGrid : Supports multiple columns, editing, column locking, lazy loading and more.
• Live Grid / Tree: Grid / Tree virtual scrolling or live grid

Really amazing work. Sanjiv recently had a Q&A session with InfoQ where he talks about the approach taken in developing SmartGWT and the his thoughts on the differences between SmartClient and Ext.

Our own Michael Mahemoff is at it again, creating a simple little GUID generator called Guid0:

Guid0 is a GUID library for Javascript. Okay, it doesn’t yet do official, bona fide, 128-bit, GUIDs yet, mainly for API design reasons. But this is a library you might find useful if you want to generate a unique ID in your Ajax app.

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

1.  
2. // simple
3. guid = new Guid();
4. var newguid = guid.generate();
5.  
6. // options
7. guid = new Guid(
8.   {
9.         chars: Guid.constants.base85,  // or you could say "abc" if you only wanted those chars to appear
10.         epoch: “June 1, 2003″,
11.         counterSequenceLength: 2, // a counter field appended to the end
12.         randomSequenceLength: 2 // a random field appended to the end
13.   }
14. );
15.  

He is working on 128-bit support.

Noupe is doing a good job cataloging content, such as their post on great JavaScript CSS menu libraries which features:

• Sexy Sliding Menu – Andrew Sellick decided to use mootools due to the smoothness of their effects, however, he developed a sliding menu using script.aculo.us
• FastFind Menu Script – This script allows for nested menus, based on dynamic “AJAX” responses. The menu can also be dragged/dropped thanks to the jQuery Interface Library.
• Webber 2.0 Dock Menu – Great example of a dock type navigation.
• Phatfusion- Image Menu – Image menu using javascript, onClick event keeps selected item open and to close it again.
• Drag and Drop ordering in a TreePanel – This example shows basic drag and drop node moving in a tree. In this implementation there are no restrictions and anything can be dropped anywhere except appending to nodes marked “leaf” (the files).
• Custom Menu Events This is a combination of animation and custom events where Think Vitamin team show us how menu items sliding into view and firing off subscribable events using Yahoo! UI
• Context Menu Functionality This is a combination of animation and custom events where Think Vitamin team show us how menu items sliding into view and firing off subscribable events using Yahoo! UI.
• LavaLamp jQuery Sliding Menu It is a jQuery sliding nifty effect menu with light weight code and extra two more interface styles.
• Slashdot Menu- Dynamic DriveThis is a stylish collapsible menu modelled after the navigational menu found on Slashdot.
• Mootools menu with Accordeon and EffectsThis cool menu has a neat effect by hovering over the links, and opens a 2 level submenu with an accordeon.
• CSS Dock Menu If you are a big Mac fan, you will love this CSS dock menu that Nick La designed. It is using Jquery Javascript library and Fisheye component from Interface and some of their icons.
• jQuery Plugin: Sliding Menu A very simple sliding menu using the effects provided by the Interface plugin.
• Accessible expanding and collapsing menu

An interesting top 12 list has been published, on using Javascript to fix 12 common browser headaches:

1. Setting Equal Heights (jQuery example: $("#col1, #col2").equalizeCols();)
2. IE6 PNG Alpha Transperancy support
3. Changing CSS Classes in JavaScript
4. Browser selectors in CSS ($('html').addClass($.browser);)
5. min-/max- height & width support
6. Center Elements Vertically / Horizontally
7. Display Q tags in Internet Explorer
8. Increase the size of click targets and get more call-to-action conversions
9. Lazy loader
10. bgiframe: Helps ease the pain when having to deal with IE z-index issues.
11. ieFixButtons: fixes the buggy behavior of the element in Internet Explorer 6 and 7
12. Fix Overflow

As you will see, most of the solutions are jQuery plugins, but you could roll your own.

Oliver Steele gave a great talk at The Ajax Experience this week on Practical Functional JavaScript.

For his talk, he ended up creating a samples application where you can run the code directly, very similar to what John Resig did in Learn JavaScript.

The samples take you through JavaScript world, stopping for:

• Callbacks
• Functions
• Closures
• Idioms
• Throttling
• Caching
• Retry