On Feb 3, 2006, at 9:30 AM, Jim Ley wrote:
On 2/3/06, Gervase Markham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jim Ley wrote:
the document of course shows no use cases at all.
Is there some doubt that the ability to tag an arbitrary set of
elements
and later easily get an array of those elements is a useful feature
for
web development?
I've yet to hear of an actual reason to do so, people keep saying it
seems useful...
If you would like use cases, I present all of the web pages currently
using a JS implementation of getElementsByClassName based on
getElementsByTagName("*") and some manual class name inspection logic.
Yes, but they're all using it to attach events to every one of the
class, which is why you have to look at use cases, the reason they're
doing it is not because getElementsByClassName is missing, but because
addEventListenerToClass or -moz-binding etc. are missing.
It's the classic mistake of looking at making the workarounds easier,
when you should be looking at making the underlying use easier.
Jim.
Jumping in a little late here, and with a theoretical case only in that
I haven't implemented the specific combination of scripting the
animations and the markup, but work with me here....
* Take a form that has been processed with some validation error
conditions met
* Use CSS class "error" to mark some specific text elements your
favorite shade of red
* Add on of those fancy "somethings changed here" javascript animations
the AJAXy kids love to use
And you have something like this (please forgive markup errors):
<p class="error">Some information was missing. Please fill out the
entire form</p>
<form>
<fieldset>
<legend>Who are you?</legend>
<label class="error" for="fn">Name:</label> <input type="text" id="fn"
/>
</fieldset>
<fieldset>
<legend class="error">Favorite Sports (Pick at least one)</legend>
<input type="checkbox" id="hockey" /> <label for="hockey">Hockey</label>
<input type="checkbox" id="football" /> <label
for="football">Football</label>
<input type="checkbox" id="baseball" /> <label
for="baseball">Baseball</label>
</fieldset>
</form>
And a script that on document load (or some other event based trigger
like a fresh validation attempt.. point being the event listener is
elsewhere) that would grab all of the elements in the page with class
"error" and give them an animated/fading border and background for a
few seconds.
Just the first case that popped into my head. Another rough case would
be a file serving application[1] where a "thumbnail" isn't always an
<img> but sometimes a <span>No Preview Available</span> or perhaps a
flash or sound player <object> (or maybe in the future SVG) but in all
cases the element used is categorized by class="preview".
if pressed I could probably look over some old work with scripting
animations/dhtml and find cases where this would also be very helpful,
but they would be less applicable to your typical html usage.
[1] in an app like this one: http://files.lussumo.com/
--
[ Chris Casciano ]
[ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ] [ http://placenamehere.com ]
