I’ve had some fun this weekend tinkering with Jquery. It’s taken me a long time to get round to playing with this library, having thrown my eggs in the Prototype / Scriptaculous basket, but after some experimentation, I wish I’d done it sooner!

I have to admit; the syntax is nicer, much simpler (no more $$(‘selector’)) and the documentation seems better. Jquery is also lightweight and fast.

To celebrate my switchover, here’s a very simple Jquery menu demonstration!

Let’s start off with the HTML:

<div id="”content”">
<ul id="”menu”">
  <li class="”starter”&gt;menu"></li>
  <li><a href="”#”">home</a></li>
  <li><a href="”#”">about us</a></li>
  <li>a href=”#”&gt;portfolio</li>
  <li><a href="”#”">contact us</a></li>
</ul>
</div>

It doesn’t get much simpler than this! An ordered list, ready for styling. Not much to see here. Here comes the javascript:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("li:not(:first)").hide();

  $("li.starter").click(function(){
    if($("li:not(:first)").is(":visible")){
        $("li:not(:first)").fadeOut("fast");
    }else{
        $("li:not(:first)").fadeIn("fast");
    }
  })
})

Eek! Slightly more complicated. Let’s walk through it.

$(document).ready(function(){

Before we do anything, we make sure that the DOM is ready for manipulation. This has a handy side effect, when we see the next line:

$("li:not(:first)").hide();

This piece of code looks for all the ‘li’ elements in the page (disregarding the first one) and hides them, using display:none. The great thing is, since we’re doing this within $(document).ready, users with javascript switched off will still see the menu!

$("li.starter").click(function(){

This tells the browser to look out for any clicks on the li.starter element, and use the next bit of code to handle it.

if($("li:not(:first)").is(":visible")){
    $("li:not(:first)").fadeOut("fast");
}else{
    $("li:not(:first)").fadeIn("fast");
}

This part checks to see if the list items are visible, and shows them or hides them as appropriate.

You can see the full demonstration here, with comments!