any recommended frameworks?

[Max Tomlinson]

Hi and thanks for taking questions:

Are there any recommended frameworks, in particular for cross browser support?

thank you
Max Tomlinson
[ October 09, 2007: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]

[Bear Bibeault]

This week, almost all questions posted with be for Michael Bowers.

Posters, please try to use descriptive titles for your posts!

I've adjusted this one for you.

[Bear Bibeault]

Most JavaScript libraires/frameworks attempt to minimize the cross-browser pain. Did you have more specific requirements?

For low-level frameworks, jQuery and Prototype seem to be very popular. Higher-level frameworks like Dojo and DWR also have their place but are more intrusive.

[Timothy Stone]

Consider the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI).

Okay, I admit it, this is the second post I have made with this recommendation, and I'm a bit of an evangelist.

The YUI might not be as popular as Prototype + Scriptaculous or Dojo, but it is far more intutitive. The latter two frameworks seem to "hate" JavaScript and HTML (rewriting it in their respective ways), whereas the YUI is JavaScript and CSS, just plain and simple. No reinventing. Additionally, it is far better documented than Dojo, and short of a guarantee or promise, provides some reassurance that it will work across multiple platforms.

DWR is interesting and complements YUI nicely with JSON boxing of server side objects. And the YUI, like the others is further complemented by ext.js.

You can look up all of these in your favorite search engine.

[Mike Bowers]

"Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns" uses several JavaScript Frameworks.

One best practice for using JavaScript with CSS is to use JavaScript to modify the class attributes of an element to dynamically change how the element is styled. This is the best way for JavaScript to modify the style of an element: CSS defines the style through a class and JavaScript dynamically assigns classes to elements.

I wrote a framework that does this. It is included with my book. You can download it at http://cssdesignpatterns.com Internally this framework uses the Yahoo event library which unifies event handling across the different browsers.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/event/

As a complement to the best practice of using JavaScript to modify only the class attributes of elements, my book advocates selecting XHTML elements in JavaScript using the CSS selector syntax. This approach allows you to use the same CSS selectors to select elements in CSS and in JavaScript. Using the same selector syntax makes CSS and JavaScript code more intuitive and more maintainable. Check out Chapter 17 of my book. This is really cool!

To select elements in JavaScript using CSS selector syntax, you need a JavaScript library. My framework uses the cssQuery library created by Dean Edwards at http://dean.edwards.name/my/cssQuery/

Lastly, I show you in the book how to use JavaScript without inserting a single line of JavaScript into the body of an HTML document! This is really cool stuff and makes for a very clean separation of design (CSS), structure (XHTML), and interaction (JavaScript)!