Reviewing More DHTML Effects from the Scriptaculous DHTML Library - Working with the Highlight effect
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Since the DHTML module of the Scriptaculous framework comes bundled with four “core” effects, the only one that remains to cover is “Highlight” (remember that the other three were discussed in the first tutorial).
As its name suggests, this effect can be used to highlight any element of a web page by using different options. To illustrate two possible uses of this brand new effect, below I included a pair of examples that demonstrate how to apply it using distinct input parameters.
Please take a look at the corresponding code samples:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Example of Highlight effect (with duration parameter)</title>
<script language="javascript" src="scriptaculous/js/prototype.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="scriptaculous/js/scriptaculous.js"></script>
<script language="javascript">
// display effect
function displayEffect(){
new Effect.Highlight('container',{duration: 1.0});
}
function initializeElement(){
Event.observe($('container'),'click',displayEffect,false);
}
Event.observe(window,'load',initializeElement,false);
</script>
<style type="text/css">
#container{
position: absolute;
top: 200px;
left: 200px;
width: 300px;
height: 100px;
padding: 10px;
background: #cf9;
font: normal 11px Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color: #000;
text-align: center;
border: 1px solid #999;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">This element is going to highlight now!</div>
</body>
</html>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Example of Highlight effect</title>
<script language="javascript" src="scriptaculous/js/prototype.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="scriptaculous/js/scriptaculous.js"></script>
<script language="javascript">
// display effect
function displayEffect(){
new Effect.Highlight('container',{startcolor:'#ccff99', endcolor:'#cccccc'})
}
function initializeElement(){
Event.observe($('container'),'click',displayEffect,false);
}
Event.observe(window,'load',initializeElement,false);
</script>
<style type="text/css">
#container{
position: absolute;
top: 200px;
left: 200px;
width: 300px;
height: 100px;
padding: 10px;
background: #cf9;
font: normal 11px Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color: #000;
text-align: center;
border: 1px solid #999;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div id="container">This element is going to highlight now!</div>
</body>
</html>
As was mentioned previously, the “Highlight” effect accepts a range of parameters that can be used to change its behavior. This fact is clearly demonstrated by the pair of hands-on examples listed above. The first one simply “highlights” a DIV element by specifying only the duration of the effect, while the second one uses two background colors to create a transition between them. Quite simple, right?
Logically, there’s plenty of room here to experiment with the different options. Try combining them to obtain a truely eye-catching animation effect. Your own creativity is your driving force.
At this point, you hopefully understand how to use the four core effects packaged with the Scriptaculous library. However, one of the best things about this JavaScript software is that it will allow you combine two or more basic effects in a single statement. In the context of the library, this is called a “parallel” effect. It can be really useful to achieve more impressive results.
So do you want to see how a parallel effect can be coded? All right, click on the link that appears below and keep reading.
Next: Creating parallel DHTML effects with Scriptaculous >>
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