Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with dhtml

Zoomy Lightbox a la Firefox?

CaptApollo — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:09:06 -0800

I am in love with the zoom-in dialog box used for the video demo on the Firefox 3.5 'what's new' screen. Is there a cross-browser equivalent? I know about various 'lightbox' scripts, but this zoom thing is new to me.

Super-configurable javascript calendar picker?

delfuego — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 08:09:41 -0800

Does anyone know of a Javascript/DHTML date picker (or calendar widget, or whatever you want to call it) that allows you to configure it so that only specific date choices are available? Specifically, I'd love to find one that lets me set its configuration such that only the first or third Mondays of the month are clickable, or other restrictions similar to this. Any thoughts?

jQuery vs. Scriptaculous

afx114 — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 15:49:10 -0800

JavaScript: jQuery vs Scriptaculous - Which is currently the favorite amongst developers? I'm about to implement a JavaScript framework on a large project. I have years and years of experience with JavaScript, DOM, AJAX, etc, but this will be my first time using a JavaScript framework. Finally making the jump in the hopes that it will make my life easier.

Which of the big-boys are favorited amongst developers these days? It seems like it's currently down to jQuery vs Scriptaculous, but I'm open to other suggestions. I realize that it comes down largely to personal preference, but I'd mainly like to know the pluses, minuses, and differences between the two. Performance and Ease-of-Use are top priorities. Please no fanboy flamewars, thx. :)

Tonight I'm gonna blog like it's 1993

Kadin2048 — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:26:02 -0800

What blog/CMS software would you recommend that doesn't rely on MySQL or another database backend? So, I finally broke down and bought a vanity domain for myself, and I want to set up a small site there, just to provide occasional updates to my friends and family, and maybe host some other content that I want to share. It's nothing big, I don't expect much/any traffic, and I'm not looking to make money off of it.

I decided to go with Nearly Free Speech for hosting, because they offer a nice metered plan that only charges me for the bandwidth that I actually use, which is cool. But they (quite reasonably) charge extra for SQL processes. So I'd like to find some sort of simple CMS that doesn't require a database to run. PHP4 and CGI (all major languages incl. Perl, Python, Ruby) are both OK.

The only things that have turned up so far are FlatPress, which is a sort of WordPress clone that uses flat files, and Simple PHP Blog. Are there other packages that I'm missing? Has anyone ever used either one? How bad are they to set up? FlatPress seems a little light on documentation...at least compared to regular WordPress, which has a lot of 'Howto'-style documentation because everyone and their cousin seems to use it.

This question last August was about alternatives to popular blog packages that don't require complex coding, but I'm less concerned with that than I am in just avoiding SQL completely.

I don't care about anything very fancy, like the ability to use plugins or customize the style very much. I just want a way of throwing content up onto the site, without having to maintain, organize, and edit a lot of static HTML files. I don't really even care about comments, although they're a plus.

Maybe what I'm looking for really isn't "blog" software. Really, I just want some sort of management system, that avoids the static-HTML morass that I dread from my early-90s experiments with personal web sites. (I used to manage things by keeping a local mirror of the site, adding my content by hand, and then using an FTP client to sync the server's copy. It worked OK, but I want to be able to update from the road, without being tied to the machine with the local mirror.)

Anyway, I'm open to any suggestions, experiences, or anecdotes that folks would like to give.

Help me find a menu that doesn't suck

TungstenChef — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:36:55 -0800

I need a good DHTML menu package. I'm designing a web application and right now I've got a basic Suckerfish dropdown menu, but I want something with a little more style. I would love to use something like radmenu but my app is written in ColdFusion not .net. I need a recommendation, it's no problem if it costs a few hundred bucks.

AJAX/DHTML date picker that doesn't suck

alan — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 14:07:20 -0800

I'm looking for a lightweight, reusable, "server neutral", DHTML/AJAX style date-picker calendar widget without any Internet Explorer memory leaks. Not looking like ass is a plus. Free is great, reasonably priced is fine. Does anyone have a favorite? To give you an idea what I'm looking for, here are a few I've rejected.

1. YUI Calendar. Well engineered, but 83 KB of code is a little too heavy.

2. Frequency Decoder Unobstrusive Date-Picker. Very slick, but has a ton of IE memory leaks, and with 61 KB of code we're still a little heavy.

3. Zapatec. Heavy, and it's a bit pricey for an unrestricted licesnse.

4. CalendarXP. No built in "pop-up" support, it's a bit pricey for an unrestricted licesnse, and on the edge of "heaviness" (about 40kb - 80kb, depending on how you implement things)

Thanks in advance!

looking for web image rotator that does text captions

intermod — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 06:13:27 -0800

Web / Flash / DHTML Developers: help me find an image rotator for a website home page; I want it to take text from a config file and overlay it on the image, like a caption; some more specific requirements follow I run the website for a non-profit visual arts / performance organization, and I would like to add an "image rotator" to the home page. This would be an app (in Flash or Javascript) that would slowly go through a slideshow of images, with some caption text. It wouldn't just randomly give me one static image each time the page loads ... it needs to change every N seconds, by itself. We have lots of events going on constantly, but there are always a few key ones that we really want to push.

I want this to be trivial for me to administer, which leads to these desires:
1. ability to upload to a designated directory and that automatically includes it in the rotation
2. failing #1, at most I have to add the image filename reference to a config file (e.g. an XML file)
3. ability to have me provide text (either in individual text file or in larger config file) and have that text overlaid at bottom of image, or directly below, as a caption.
4. no requirement for recompiling a flash app, i.e. using flash authoring tool
5. clicking on image takes browser to URL defined in text/config file
6. bonus points for pausing on mouseover
7. double bonus points for fade in/out between images
8. triple bonus points (and standing ovation) for ability to provide URL to image elsewhere on web -- not actually uploaded to my own website

If Flash, then it needs to be functional with Flash 6 at minimum.
If JS/DHTML, it needs to work in IE6 and Mozilla/Firefox.

My site is already running ASP (yuck). Rather than muck with the ASP more than I have to with this inherited site, I'd rather embed JS or Flash. But if someone knows of an ASP solution that does exactly what I'm looking for, please let me know.

I guess it looks like a lot of constraints, but these kinds of image rotators are all over the web, so I'm hoping that someone here already has experience with these and can guide me to a good one, or narrow the population down to the one's that are most well-known, stable, documented, etc.

Here are two that I found that come close:

http://www.datasprings.com/Products/DNNModules/FlashImageRotator/tabid/372/Default.aspx
http://www.datasprings.com/portals/0/flash1.jpg
problem: it requires a "DNN" web environment?

http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_JPG_Rotator
problem: no text overlay?

http://www.google.com/search?q=flash+image+rotator+caption
more found by Googling but none quite fit the bill

Having searched the web, the key requirement that's hard to find is that I want to specify text to overlay on the image, or show just below image. If this just isn't out there, maybe I can find a separate script/processor that will add the text via command line process. I just don't want to have to run an image editing program and manually dork around with text placement every time I get a new image to add to the rotator.

I'm not averse to paying for this, either for an off-the-shelf product or for someone here to code it up for me.

Keeping inventory in HTML, boo to Excel!

clango — Fri, 19 May 2006 15:33:17 -0800

AJAX / DHTML / javascript-filter: If I have an HTML table of numbers, is there a script I can add which would allow me to have a little -/+ button for each cell that would adjust the value of a number in the cell? This is for simple inventory management and would preferably just run as a local HTML file on a Mac OS X machine. (or flash drive)

Free menu code?

tizzie — Fri, 19 May 2006 08:14:08 -0800

Where can I find free DHTML menu code that doesn't require a visible link back to the developer's website?

Regex: Text from HTML, no attributes

ph00dz — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 19:15:47 -0800

Regex Madness...filter. How do I pull the text out of an html document without looking at the tag attributes? I'm using javascript... and I am just stuck. I think my brain is about to explode.

I'm trying to pull certain things out of an html document. Let's say, for simplicity's sake, it looks like this... 'cept with html tags. (Had to change 'em to display here.)



[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"]

[html]

  [head]

  [meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1250"]

  [meta name="generator" content="PSPad editor, www.pspad.com"]

  [title]Sample Document[/title]

  [/head]

  [body]

    [p]

      [img src="http://blah.com/sample.jpg"]

    [/p]

    [p]

      Some text is [a href="fjkj.html"]here[/a]

    [/p]

  [/body]

[/html]

All I want out of that thing is:
Sample Document
Some text is
here

Is that possible? I thought I had something working... but I was so wrong.

I tried to spider down through the dom, but I never could get that right either.

As a bonus... is there a particular book/tutorial folks recommend for understandings the mighty regex?

What's a really good DOM/Javascript/DHTML quick-glance reference?

namespan — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 13:27:40 -0800

What's a really good DOM/Javascript/DHTML quick-glance reference? I'm talking about something I could post on my cube wall, or maybe a folded 11 x 16, or *maybe* a very well organized large page-size small-page # booklet. Up to date cross-browser coverage. Free is nice, but I'm willing to pay.

amazon.com javascript/dhtml menu feature

masymas — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 20:52:48 -0800

I'd like to re-create the dhtml/javascript menu amazon.com uses in the top navigation button "See All 32 Product Categories". I've run out of google juice. There's an answer on experts-exchanges.com but I thought I'd post here before paying...

IE... you are my enemy! (At least when it comes to CSS/Javascript)

ph00dz — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 06:41:47 -0800

How the heck do I iterate through all a given div's style sheet in IE? This code works fine in mozilla, but IE can't get a grip on the style.length to start the loop...

var ix = document.getElementById('playground').childNodes[i].style.length;
while(ix--)
{
styleElement = document.getElementById('playground').childNodes[i].style[ix];
styleAttribute = document.getElementById('playground').childNodes[i].style.getPropertyValue(styleElement);
logMessage('attribute: ' + styleElement + ' value: ' + styleAttribute );
}

JavaScript only RSS parser?

jpburns — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 06:31:35 -0800

I wasted a lot of time the other day trying to reinvent the wheel. I wanted to write a web-based RSS parser. I was trying to write it as a JavaScript-only parser. I ran into a lot of frustrations with the security restrictions built into client-side JavaScript, so I thought I'd ask: Can one open and parse a remote file with DOM navigation using only JavaScript, or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks!

DHTML-ish function question...

jpburns — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:01:40 -0800

I keep trying to come up with a generalized way to scale a webpage image in a gradual fashion using JavaScript. I can do it in a specific way (with one hard-coded named image); it's the generalized form (that would work with any rolled-over image) that's giving me fits... Here's what I've come up with:



function growImage(){

// this is triggered by a mouseOver event...

// increase image's height

  this.height++;

// check and see if it's < 200 pixels in size if (this.height  200) { // set self-recursive timer my_timeout=setTimeout(" growImage;" , 1000); } } /code>



What seems to happen is it increments the size on the first pass, and then loses the global "this" value when it iterates (I think). I want to be able to call this function from any image on the page, and have that image grow and shrink in a smooth fashion (like the animated Google toolbar that surfaced lately).



Perhaps in a more generalized question (there I go, searching for a generalized solution...), where's a good place to ask a question like this? There are so many sites, but I don't know what's a "good" one to quiz...



Thanks in advance.

Printing watermarks with CSS

mexican — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 00:41:38 -0800

What CSS properties do you need to set to get a DIV to show up on every page of the printed version of a web page? I'm doing some work for a company that requires a confidentially notice on all printed documents. The notice could be an image but I'd prefer to use a DIV so that the contents of the notice can be easily edited. It would also be nice if the notice wasn't rendered on top of other content. I'm using separate style sheets for web and print versions a-la the wikipedia monobook skin.

DHTML advice sought.

Pericles — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 02:24:44 -0800

Can this be done with snazzy DOM scripting, or do I Flash or (shudder) Iframes? On this mock-up I'm loading in two multi-paragraph records, one is a section of law, the second is guidance. All the info is loaded at the start.

What I want is a way for the user to click on the paragraph of their choice in the left "rule" window, and the relevant paragraph of guidance automatically scroll to its proper place at the top of the right-hand "guidance" window. I don't want to have to go back to the server and thus refresh the page.

I don't want to use Flash, and Iframes have accessibility problems. Can anyone tell me if it's possible using "DHTML" and give me a pointers about where I can look. I've had my fill of generic "what is dhtml" tutorials.

Why in Frontpage Do HTML Effects Preview Fine But Then Error Out Later?

moonbird — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 12:59:59 -0800

Goofy Frontpage question: I use Frontpage to just get a basic visual framework of a site in front of me, then I go in and do my own coding. Yet I'm stupmed as to why, when I use a DHTML effect that previews fine, but upon load is non-existent or gives me an error... any suggestions? Specifically, I'm trying to do a simple mouseover command that underlines, italicizes, or boldens, but in Mozilla or IE, nothing happens and I get an 'error on page' notification. I can post a link to an example if that helps... thanks in advance.

DHTML/CSS

banished — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 06:44:33 -0800

DHTML/CSS Wizards: I am looking for free source code to create a simple two-tiered menu. When you hover above a link in a horizontal list of links, each link will display the sublinks in another horizontal bar underneath the first list of links. An example can be seen at macromedia.com. Although I could do this easily enough in Flash, I'm hoping there is some code already out there somewhere in DHTML/CSS/XHTML.

Freeware version of DHTML navbar menu?

twine42 — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 10:32:06 -0800

I love the DHTML navbar menu thing available at Mishoo, but I'm loathe to spend £25 on it. Does anyone know if there's a decent OS/Freeware version of it around?