Scripting

10 JavaScript Quick Tips and Best Practices

By Louis Lazaris / July 1, 2009 / 18 Comments

Recently, a few blogs and tutorial sites have posted some really good articles on JavaScript tips and best practices, and I thought that was a good topic that could easily be expanded upon. So I put together a list of 10 fairly simple JavaScript tips and best practices of my own.

I tried to include stuff that was not mentioned in those other posts, but I’m sure there is a little bit of overlap. Keep in mind that these are brief tips and recommendations, so I don’t go into great detail about the reasons and such, but I may go into some of them in depth in future articles and tutorials.

In the meantime, please enjoy this list of tips, recommendations, and best practices for JavaScript coding.

10 Essential DOM Methods & Techniques for Practical JavaScript

By Louis Lazaris / May 20, 2009 / 16 Comments

Whether you use a JavaScript framework, or you are a purist and always resort to coding your client-side scripts from scratch, there are certain DOM syntaxes with which you should be at least a little bit familiar.

It’s true that a library like jQuery or MooTools will perform these methods for you, behind the scenes. In fact, if you rely on JS libraries for virtually all your JavaScript code, you’ll rarely have to use any of these methods directly.

But the reality is that, whether we develop as freelancers or work for a development firm, we may not always have the luxury of working on fresh projects where we can pretty much do what we want; we may have to maintain sites that rely on “obtrusive” scripting methods, or, for one reason or another, we may not be permitted to use certain libraries.

Whatever your situation, the following review of various practical DOM methods will hopefully serve to bolster your JavaScript knowledge and possibly help you more readily see practical solutions to various client-side issues.

7 JavaScript Differences Between Firefox & IE

By Louis Lazaris / April 27, 2009 / 36 Comments

Although the days of long and tedious code branches to target specific browsers in JavaScript are over, once in a while it’s still necessary to do some simple code branching and object detection to ensure that a certain piece of code is working properly on a user’s machine.

In this article, I’ll outine 7 areas where Internet Explorer and Firefox differ in JavaScript syntax.

JavaScript-Powered HTML Table Code Generator

By Louis Lazaris / April 13, 2009 / 14 Comments

Recently I searched Google to try to find an HTML table code generator that would let me easily create an HTML table quickly and efficiently, similar to how Dreamweaver does it — but with more customization options that are in line with the the latest in web standards and best practices. I also wanted to be able to enter my data right inside the code generator itself, and not have to copy the code with empty cells, then tediously cut and paste all the data into the individual cells. I found a few options that were reasonably good, but I decided instead to build my own HTML table code generator using pure, (sort of) unobtrusive JavaScript. The entire table and data insertion would take place on the client side and be fully customizable and easy to use.

Well, after about 5 or 6 hours of blood sweat and tears (not really, it was fun), I’ve completed what I feel is one of the most efficient and useful table code generators available on the web. I know what you’re thinking: tables aren’t used very often these days by top web developers, and all HTML editors provide good support for table code generation. But the customization I’ve added and the ease with which the data can be inserted I think is worth giving it a try.

Must-Use Methods to Spam-Proof Your Email Address

By Louis Lazaris / June 25, 2008 / 3 Comments

Working for a busy web development & hosting company exposes me to the sad fact that well over 90% of website owners today do virtually nothing to protect themselves from email spam. Spam filters are good, and they’ve come a long way, but they are not the perfect solution — far from it. Even with a close to perfect spam filtering system in place (which never happens), users will still be inclined to waste time sifting through junk mail just to ensure that nothing was incorrectly filtered.

In this post, I’ll describe a few solid methods to ensure that your email address will not be harvested by “bots” or other automated programs that harvest emails from naive website owners.

Equal Column Height Using JavaScript

By Louis Lazaris / May 29, 2008 / 1 Comment

I’m currently working on a project that requires that I use either some very tricky CSS or else JavaScript to make a left column div expand automatically to fit its parent container. The parent container and left hand nav appear on multiple pages, and there is different content, including that which is dynamically generated, so I cannot just add a height to both elements in the CSS.