How to speed up JavaScript using the DOMready event
One of the problems many JavaScript programmers meet when trying to produce their own page control is timing and event cluttering.
Elastic and bouncing transitions in scriptaculous
Scriptaculous has a lot of transitions, but in some situations, you want to sprinkle up a dull animation, applying a different, custom transition type.
Back in 2003, Robert Penner wrote the easing equations, a set of math formulas in Flash Actionscript released under the BSD license, that simulate various types of physical effects, the most notable are the overshooting elastic and bouncing ones. For an example, look at the demo here.
Three years later, Ken Snyder adapted the equations for scriptaculous, enabling builtin and custom animations to use these new nice effects as transitions. However the Penner easing equations were highly configurable, where instead in the Snyder ones you can only set the duration, because the other parameters are fixed in the source code. Also, not all (indeed, only a few) of the transitions have been ported, and their names have been changed too.
Optimize pages for search engines with dynamic CSS/javascript HTML building (how to make your own lightbox working example!)
CSS, DHTML and Javascript work really good together. In fact, I tend to use the combination to replace Flash whenever it's appropriate (usually, most of the time!).
Javascript 'building' is a technique where you dynamically add original nodes to your DOM, usually based on existing content.
Speaking in (sort of) plain english, this means you can create a slideshow from an unordered list, a tabbed or sliding control set from a group of divs, an image viewer from a link (everyone now knows Lightbox v2 by Lokesh Dhakar).