JQuery: Novice to Ninja- P22:No matter what kind of ninja you are—a cooking ninja, a corporate lawyer ninja, or an actual ninja ninja—virtuosity lies in first mastering the basic tools of the trade. Once conquered, it’s then up to the full-fledged ninja to apply that knowledge in creative and inventive ways. | 292 jQuery Novice to Ninja But the rise of the Rich Internet Application is changing that. Clients expect our web-based systems to rival their desktop applications for usability and design. Thankfully with jQuery by our side that s no problem Lists Lists are the real unsung heroes of the post table-based layout period of the Web. As designers were freed from the constraints of the tyrannical table cell they started to look for other semantically correct ways to recreate common user interface elements such as menus navigation panels tag clouds and so on. And time after time as the redundant layout cruft was stripped from the underlying data all that was left behind was a list The StarTrackr site is already home to an extensive array of lists they form the basis of our tabs accordions menus image galleries and more but there s far more we can do to augment and enhance the humble list. jQuery UI Selectables The ocean of user-generated content is proving a handful for our client. Thousands of tags are pouring in from the site s users but now the legal department is saying that as the manager he has to approve every single one manually to avoid a repeat of a recent nasty litigation. Because the site employs an unconstrained tag system there are stacks of duplicate tags in the lists and with the current system that means stacks of extra administration. What the client really wants is a way to easily see tags select them and any duplicates and click a button to approve or reject them. Our plan of attack is to add jQuery Ul s selectable behavior to our list. Making an element selectable gives the user the ability to lasso any of the element s children to select them if you click on one element then drag over subsequent elements they become highlighted. You can than process the selection however you see fit. Perfect for administrating boring lists The behavior we re aiming to create is illustrated in Figure . Lists Trees and Tables 293 Figure . Selectable list items .
