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Advanced DOM Scripting

by Jeffrey Sambells and Aaron Gustafson

I, Michael Parker, own this book and took these notes to further my own learning. If you enjoy these notes, please purchase the book!

Chapter 1: Do It Right with Best Practices

  • pg 11: Instead of using inline event attributes, use unobtrusive techniques to add the event handlers when the window loads.
  • pg 14: Instead of browser sniffing to find what features you can use, use capability detection and check for the existence of methods directly.
  • pg 16: Don't require Javascript for content, as search engine crawlers will miss it.
  • pg 21: When creating your namespace with its methods, check that it doesn't already exist if your library is already included from another file.
  • pg 28: The display property can be toggled between none and empty (the string ''), which is the default.
  • pg 31: Prefer single quotes in Javascript, and leave the double quotes for XHTML attributes as its specification requires.
  • pg 39: The hasOwnProperty method returns true if the object has the property or method specified, ignoring any inherited properties or methods.

Chapter 2: Creating Your Own Reusable Objects

  • pg 63: Static members exist only on a specific instance of an object, by manual assignment and not through any prototype property.
  • pg 67: Private methods are defined within a constructor or another method, but not available externally through any instance.
  • pg 68: Privileged methods are defined within the constructor using the this keyword, and can access private methods while being publicly accessible.
  • pg 70: When you declare function foo() { ... }, you can call the function before its definition. If you use var foo = function() { ... }, you can't.
  • pg 74: When a method of an object is used as an event handler, you can bind this to the object again using call or apply.

Chapter 3: Understanding the DOM2 Core and DOM2 HTML

  • pg 91: DOM Level 2 builds on Level 1 by specifying mouse-related events and the ability to access and manipulate CSS styles.
  • pg 94: Internet Explorer 7 only supports some of DOM Level 1, but supports some features of Level 2 (like events) in its own way.
  • pg 101: IE will only create a text node in the DOM if it contains something other than whitespace.
  • pg 105: The nodeValue property of a Node returns the value of an attribute node or the content of a text node, and null in most other cases.
  • pg 111: Attributes are implementations of the Core Attr interface and are contained in a NamedNodeMap in a node's attribute property.
  • pg 113: The attributes.getNamedItem method will work on any node, while the getAttribute method only works on instances of Element.
  • pg 117: Don't modify the prototype of any DOM classes like Node; it's flaky across browsers, and may override any future additions to the DOM specification.
  • pg 122: The Document class has a getElementsByTagName like Element does, but technically it's different; it also adds getElementById.
  • pg 126: The HTMLDocument class inherits from Document, and adds properties like title, referrer, body, images, forms, and anchors.
  • pg 127: The HTMLElement class inherits from Element, and adds properties like id, title (for tooltip rollovers), and className.
  • pg 133: The DOM names CSS properties like font-size as fontSize, and class as className.

Chapter 4: Responding to User Actions and Events

  • pg 154: The mousemove event has no specified period or distance in which it fires.
  • pg 156: A click and dblclick event will only happen if the mouse remains stationary; regardless of the mouse motion, a mousedown and mouseup event occurs.
  • pg 159: Key-related events apply only to the document object.
  • pg 161: The focus and blur evens only apply to label, input, select, textarea, and button form elements.
  • pg 182: Event listeners registered using the W3C event model do not necessarily execute in the order in which they're added.
  • pg 183: Beware that the load event is only executed after all the images have been loaded as well.
  • pg 196: A simple drag-and-drop effect can be created with a mousemove event listener that moves an element to the cursor's location.
  • pg 197: Keyboard commands are not in the DOM2 Events specification, but all browsers supply the Unicode value of a key press in the keyCode property.

Chapter 5: Dynamically Modifying Style and Cascading Style Sheets

  • pg 205: CSSStyleSheet represents a stylesheet with CSSStyleRules, while the CSSStyleDeclaration class represents an object's style property.
  • pg 214: A CSSStyleDeclaration instance of an element only contains the inline style properties, and hence does not contain the overall computed style.
  • pg 216: The only time mixing style and scripting is acceptable practice is in the case of positioning, e.g. drag-and-drop.
  • pg 220: Use the className property to assign classes, as setAttribute requires an attribute name of 'class' in W3C and 'className' in IE.
  • pg 222: Setting the rel attribute of a stylesheet link to "alternate stylesheet" will load the stylesheet but disable it; Javascript can enable it later.
  • pg 228: A new stylesheet can be used by dynamically creating a new link element referencing the stylesheet and adding it to the head tag.
  • pg 232: The W3C browsers contain the rules in a stylesheet in the variable cssRules, while IE contains them in rules.
  • pg 233: The W3C insertRule method combines the selector name and its definition in a single argument, while the addRule method of IE combines them.
  • pg 238: The computed style of an element is accessible through document.defaultView.getComputedStyle in W3C, and element.currentStyle in IE.

Chapter 7: Adding Ajax to the Mix

  • pg 286: IE 7 and later support the XMLHttpRequest object, while earlier versions must use the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX component.
  • pg 289: The onreadystatechange listener doesn't receive any arguments, so the XMLHttpRequest object must be defined in the same scope for it to be available.
  • pg 289: If the response has MIME type application/xml, the response will be interpreted as XML and not HTML, so the DOM2 HTML methods won't work.
  • pg 291: Within the onreadystatechange property, the this keyword refers to the method itself and not the XMLHttpRequest object.
  • pg 298: To parse JSON from an Ajax response, prefer a JSON parser over eval unless the information in the response is entirely controlled by you.
  • pg 307: To bypass cross-site restrictions, dynamically generated script elements can run with a source from any domain and their Javascript will run normally.
  • pg 328: Replies to concurrent requests may come back out of order; guard against this causing inconsistent application behavior.