JAVASCRIPT

A Close Look at the Yahoo Button Control

If you've ever wanted a little help with the user interfaces for your web site, you might want to learn about the Yahoo Button Control. It comes from Yahoo's UI framework, and can help you to create an interactive and professional-looking front end for your web site. This article, the first one in a five-part series, gives you a taste of what you can do with it.

Author Info:

By: Alejandro Gervasio

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November 20, 2007

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In accordance with the concepts that I expressed in the previous section, it’s perfectly feasible to build a Button Control by using different web form tags. With reference to this topic in particular, I already showed you how to include a simple control into a sample web page using different form elements, such as conventional and radio buttons, so in this case I’m going to teach you how to perform the same task, but utilizing a checkbox.

Having explained that, here’s the corresponding code sample that displays on the browser a basic Yahoo! Button Control by using a common checkbox. Have a look at it, please:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<head>

<title>Example of simple Yahoo Button with existing input tag
(checkbox)</title>

</head>

var sButton = new YAHOO.widget.Button(

"button1", // id of source element

{

checked: false, // override button attribute

label: "Click me!"

}

);

</script>

</body>

</html>

As you can see, building basic Yahoo! Control Buttons using different elements of a web form is actually a straightforward procedure that can be tackled with minor hassles. In this case, I utilized a basic checkbox to include the control into a sample web document, but the same approach can be implemented with conventional and radio buttons as well.

Finally, in order to complete the implementation of the practical example, below I included an additional screen shot, which shows the visual appearance of the Control Button created earlier:

All right, having already provided you with a decent number of demonstrative examples of how to build different Yahoo Button Controls using existing structural markup, I believe that you shouldn’t have major problems working with these user interface elements on your own. As with other topics related to professional web development, practice is the best way to go.

Final thoughts

In this first article of the series, you hopefully learned how to build basic web controls by using the neat Yahoo Button Control bundled with the Yahoo UI library. As you saw previously, all of the code samples demonstrated how to create these buttons from existing (X)HTML.

Nevertheless, as I said in the beginning of this article, it’s possible to build these controls with only a few lines of JavaScript code. I'll cover this topic in the next part of the series, so if you’re interested in learning this approach, don’t miss it!

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