Why Design This Page?
Time to time programmers see a technology they think is interesting but do not have the time
to look in to it. This was the case with jQuery when I used it on a project. It seemed to have
a lot of good features that I wanted to look back into later. So later on I had come across
a couple of jQuery enabled packages and though a tech demo would help me learn more about them.
It also helped that I found an image site that was doing some cool things with HTTP Rewrite so
I could call up the images dynamically.
Technology Used
jQuery
jQuery is a framework designed to make JavaScript programming less verbose. In the process they
simplify the syntax and provide simplification of writing dynamic content. Some of its features
I used on this page are the ability to search for elements in the DOM and also dynamically add
and remove them, assigning properties and content along the way. 98% of the markup of the site
is created programmatically with jQuery.
jQuery UI
There are some page features that are fairly standard and there is no need to reinvent the wheel
every time you want to use them. jQuery UI takes care of some of these features for you. For
example the tabs and the context popup that you are reading now are generated by the jQuery UI
library.
ColorBox
This was a reference I had seen debugging some other sites code. Back in the beginning there was
a library called Lightbox. It was simple and free, and slowly sites started adopting it to make
their pictures and content present professionally. ColorBox takes this library concepts and
recreates them using jQuery. The image pop-ups are generated using ColorBox.
CSS
The extra css configuration for the floating orientation of the images is provided by custom
css that I wrote for the site.
JavaScript
jQuery, jQuery, ColorBox, and driving code and some utility functions that are on this page
are all written in JavaScript. jQuery, jQuery, ColorBox are publicly available libraries, while
the code that drives this page and the utilities were written/created by me.