Shazam! - DHTML

It's the bane of Web developers everywhere - conflicting standards, browser incompatibilities, and code that changes every time a new browser version hits the Web. But fear not - charging in on a white steed comes a heroic knight, clad in the attire of the new W3C DOM and armed with the tools to make this nightmare end forever. Read on to find out how the new DOM finally brings some standards to the decidedly non-standard world of the Web.

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By: Vikram Vaswani, (c) Melonfire

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April 09, 2001

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TOOLS YOU CAN USE

The DOM also allows you to modify CSS properties of specific HTML tags - asthe following example demonstrates:


<html>
<head>
<script language="JavaScript">
function disappear()
{
var obj = document.getElementById("mirage");
obj.style.display = "none";
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="mirage">
Now you see it...
</div>
<a href="javascript:disappear()">...now you don't!</a>
</body>
</html>

I've done something similar in the very first example in this article -take a look at that one too, while you're at it.

Using this technique, it's possible to apply almost any inline style to anelement on the page. Remember that style properties which are hyphenated -for example, "background-color" and "font-family" - need to be written as asingle word with the first character after the hyphen capitalized - forexample, "backgroundColor" and fontFamily". The next example shouldillustrate this clearly:


<html>
<head>
<script language="JavaScript">
function transform()
{
var obj = document.getElementById("marvel");
obj.style.fontFamily = "Verdana";
obj.style.fontSize = "40pt";
obj.style.backgroundColor = "red";
obj.style.color = "black";
obj.style.textDecoration = "underline";
obj.style.textAlign = "center";
obj.style.letterSpacing = "10";
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="marvel">
Captain Marvel
</div>
<a href="javascript:transform()">shazam!</a>
</body>
</html>

That's about it for the moment. In the second part of this article, I'll berunning through some simple code examples for simple JavaScriptapplications - image swaps, form validation and frame navigation - usingthe new DOM structures. I'll also be discussing the appendChild() andcreateNode() functions, which allow developers to add new elements to thedocument tree through program code. Don't miss it!