3rd Party Libraries: Scriptaculous: Posts

via ajaxian:

CSS is pretty central to Ajax, and large Ajax projects often have a lot of CSS to deal with, so it’s worthwhile asking how to maintain all of it. Garrett Dimon’s Architecting CSS is a good set of advice for structuring your CSS files (from July, 2005; unearthed on Digg).

The article identifies three ways to organise your stylesheets:

• Archetype-Based A stylesheet for each class of page, e.g. homepage stylesheet, article stylesheet, etc.
• Page Element/Section-Based A stylesheet for each class of page section, e.g. header stylesheet, sidebar stylesheet.
• Tag-Based Similar to the previous approach, but based around tags, e.g. form stylesheet, table stylesheet.

Other topics include:

• Including stylesheets with @include
• Deciding how much to rely on selectors (Redundancy vs Dependency)
• Use of comments
• Use of !important
• Alphabetizing attributes to ensure you don’t forget any

So I posted yesterday in my flurry of catch-up posts about the mad4milk.net guys new framework: MooTools. I’ve had a little time to dig into it and I must say that I’m blown away. In many ways, this is the framework that I’d say CNET should write for itself if it were to take on such a task. | Read the rest »

The releases are coming fast and furious for Prototype and script.aculo.us. Thomas Fuchs has sync’d up to the latest Prototype adding features along the way: | Read the rest »

I just found this article on the Scriptaculous Effect Queue and I’m sold. I’d been meaning to really dig into this library and wrap my head around how best to use it, if at all. Basically Scriptaculous is a visual and interface effects library. It features the tools for doing lots of snappy looking fade in, drop in, scroll out, etc. effects and also effects useful for data entry and interactivity (drag and drop, live search, etc.).

One problem encountred when putting these types of effects together into strings of animations and the like is that you can have various things collide. Enter the Effect Queue:

A queue is a list of events (in the current context Effects). These events take occur one after the other (or parallel) for the purpose of preventing disturbence of current actions.