Complete Idiot's Guide to JavaScript
Complete Idiot's Guide to JavaScript
Complete Idiot's Guide to
JavaScript, Second Edition
Part 1: What's It All About?
Chapter 1: Coffee? In My Computer? I Prefer Decaf...
Chapter 2: Navigator and Explorer: The World Wide Web on a Caffeine High
Part 2: Let's Get Jivin'
Chapter 3: Tag...You're It!
Chapter 4: Off and Running...With Someone Else's Help
Part 3: JavaScript: Espresso for the Masses
Chapter 5: Objects, Names, and Literals
Chapter 6: Operators and Expressions
Chapter 7: Making a Statement
Chapter 8: Conjuction Junction, What's a Function?
Chapter 9: An Eye on Events
Chapter 10: How Much Is That Object in the Window?
Chapter 11: Mapping and Tracking: Locations and Histories
Chapter 12: The Document Shuffle
Chapter 13: Fiddling with Forms and Emulating Events
Chapter 14: Navigating with Navigator
Chapter 15: "Array" (A Ray) of Organization
Chapter 16: Image-ine That!
Chapter 17: Care for a Cookie?
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Complete Idiot's Guide to JavaScript
Part 4: Scripting the Whole Bean
Chapter 18: Script Example 1: Hello World!
Chapter 19: Script Example 2: Random Chatter
Chapter 20: Script Example 3: Which Way Do We Go?
Chapter 21: Script Example 4: Loan Calculator
Chapter 22: Script Example 5: BlackJack
Chapter 23: Script Example 6: Creating an eZine
Chapter 24: Script Example 7: Welcome Back!
Chapter 25: What to Do When It Won't Work: Debugging Your Scripts
Chapter 26: Ideas
Chapter 27: Stepping Up to Straight Java
Appendix A: JavaScript: The Complete Overview
Appendix B: Speak Like a Geek: The Complete Archive
Complete Idiot's Guide to JavaScript
Chapter 1
Coffee? In My Computer? I Prefer Decaf...
In This Chapter
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How HTML got a boost from CGI
Java takes CGI one step farther
Extending the Web
In the "old days" of the World Wide Web (three whole years ago), there were two ways to get information (also
called content) to the user. The primary way was through HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the language
used to write Web pages. HTML enables you to present text and certain types of graphics (as well as links to
connect one page to another page) either on the same computer or somewhere else in the world. As HTML has
evolved (the current standard being worked on is version 3.2), other features have been added, such as forms,
frames, tables, and so on. However, even with all the new features, HTML basically deals with Web content by:
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Formatting and displaying the content of a page.
Waiting for the user to click something in the page.
Depending on what the user clicks on, fetching something else (a new page, for example) and repeating
the process.
Although this provides a wealth of possibilities for content manipulation (just spend a little time on the Web to
see for yourself), it doesn't allow for more advanced things like accessing a database, ordering catalog items
online, or making animated graphics within a Web page. For these capabilities, you need to understand the
Common Gateway Interface, or CGI.
CGI provides a means of extending the capabilities of HTML by allowing the Web designer to write custom
programs that interact with Web pages to do more complex things. A CGI program is a file that resides on the
Web server and that the server runs in response to something inside the Web page. With CGI, you can:
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Create image maps, which are graphics that you can click on. Different areas of the graphic behave like
unique HTML links, taking you to individual pages. (You used to have to know CGI programming to
create one of these.)
An image on the image map
Which part of an image you click determines what happens next.
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Dynamically (on demand) create custom HTML pages and graphics. A common use is the ¡°You are the
34251th visitor¡± line you find on many pages.
Create simple animations by having CGI send a sequence of graphics to the browser. This produces the
Web equivalent of a ¡°flip-book,¡± where one graphic replaces the previous one.
Pushy Servers The technical term for CGI "flip-book" animation is server push.It's so named because
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Complete Idiot's Guide to JavaScript
the CGI program instructs the server to send (or "push") one graphic after another to the browser.
Conversely, you could also use CGI to instruct the browser to "pull" one graphic after another from the
server. This technique is (not surprisingly) called client pull.
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Interface with a database on the server to retrieve or add information. Online catalog ordering uses
CGI, as well as the earch engines (such as Yahoo, Lycos, and WebCrawler) that keep track
of everything there is to find on the Web
One disadvantage of CGI is that you must be a programmer to use it. Secondly, C GI requires
that the user's actions be reported back to the server for interpretation and processing. The results of this
processing then must be sent back to the user from the server. These extra transfers take time and reduce
the "immediacy" of certain Web page interactions. Furthermore, you are limited to the CGI capabilities
of your server; your provider might offer a Web server w ith incomplete CGI tools or with none at all. In
addition, multimedia (sound, graphics, animation) has become all the rage, and everything in c omputers
today has to support multimedia. CGI doesn¡¯t do this well.
Most CGI Programs Are Written in Perl
Because the Internet originated within the UNIX world (before Windows computers or Macintoshes
were hooked up to it), much of what drives the Internet (and the Web) is based in UNIX. CGI stems
from this same root, and the Perl language is a UNIX-based language. However, a CGI program
can be written in any language that the Web server supports.
Finally, to use CGI, you must have access to the CGI interface of the Web server that¡¯s serving up your pages. As
I¡¯ve mentioned, some providers might not support CGI access, or it might be offered for an extra (in many cases,
costly) fee.
In other words, CGI is more complex than most Web authors are interested in, and doesn¡¯t support all of the
visually fancy things authors want to include in their pages. But something else is necessary, and that something
is Java.
Java: Web Programming for the Common Man
You can¡¯t surf the Web today without hearing about Java. Java, a programming language developed by Sun
Microsystems, was designed to allow more power and flexibility for the presentation of material on the Web.
With Java, you can...
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Create animations that sing and dance.
Include prompts and dialog boxes that pop up while a user is filling out a form.
Develop games and programs that actually run¡ªright on the Web page.
Calculate a loan in real-time based on user input.
Display an accurate on-screen invoice reflecting a user's current purchases.
Access databases and other information sources.
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Complete Idiot's Guide to JavaScript
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Let your imagination wander.
Java works the floor in 3D rotating glory.
Before Java, if you wanted to view a graphic, play a movie, or listen to a sound file on the Web, you had to have
a helper application (an independent program unrelated to the browser) installed on your computer and
connected to your browser. Whenever a particular file (movie, sound, or whatever) was retrieved from the Web,
the helper would be run to display or play back the file. If you didn¡¯t have the necessary helper, you had to find
it, download it, and install it.
Java handles these things internally. No more helper applications, and no more CGI programming. All you need
is a Java-enabled browser to view Java programs, and the Java Developers Kit to design them (it¡¯s available for
free from Sun¡¯s Java Home Site, ). And, as an added bonus, the Java programs you create
(called applets or mini-applications) will run on any Java-enabled browser on any platform: Macintosh,
Windows, or UNIX. You don¡¯t need to create a program for each machine type. One size fits all.
However, Java is not without its problems. It also is a programming language, and as with all programming
languages, you must learn it relatively well in order to use it. The applets you create must be compiled (by a
compiler) before you can use them. A compiler is a special program that reads your own program and crunches it
into machine-readable binary code. In spite of the existence of several nice development packages for building
Java applets, compilers can be a hassle because you have to use them every time you make a change to your
program, and it can take a long time to compile a program.
Scrolling ticker tape Scrolling ticker tapes¡ªtrust me; they scroll.
So what you need is a way of getting the capability of Java without the added baggage of a full-blown
programming language. Well, this time, Netscape comes to the rescue (with a little help from Sun) with
JavaScript.
Enter JavaScript
JavaScript is a scripting language specifically designed to work with the World Wide Web. With JavaScript, you
can take the power of HTML and the World Wide Web and extend it in a variety of ways.
Once upon a time (not too long ago), Sun Microsystems conjured up the complex and powerful programming
language now known as Java. Although Java is highly capable, it's best suited for more complex tasks and
experienced programmers. Netscape Communications saw the need for an in-between language¡ªone that would
allow individuals to design Web pages that could interact with the user or with Java applets, but that would
require a minimum of programming experience. Always one to be first on the block, Netscape whipped up
LiveScript.
LiveScript was more of a proposal than an actual language, but it convinced people that this "bridge-the-gap"
idea was attractive. LiveScript was designed in the spirit of many simple scripting languages, but tailored with
capabilities specifically designed for Web pages (HTML and form interaction, for example). To help the
marketability of their new language, Netscape paired up with Sun, and JavaScript was born.
In theory, JavaScript is available for free to those who design Web browsers; this enables the designers to
incorporate JavaScript compatibility into their browsers. In reality, Microsoft was the first to implement a version
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