JavaScript Library Addiction
Hi. I’m Chris and I have a JavaScript library addiction. I’m guessing I’m not the only.
As I was redesigning JibberBook.com, I was trying to locate a small library to create a tab script. The minimum stuff I needed for Mootools amounted to around 32kb YUI compressed (I’m not too happy about Mootools anymore), and jQuery is 29kb packed. I thought about using DOM Assistant, but after looking at the code, decided it was too much. All I needed to do was select elements by class and id, attach an event, and change some styles and classes. Libraries were obviously overkill.
So I ended up just searching for a class selector function and an add event function and wrote everything else myself. Sure I had to search for some cross-browser techniques a couple times and had to do a bit more testing, but it was definitely worth it. The script size is under 2kb, and it’s even unobtrusive.
The moral of this story: Toss off your floaties and dive in, and don’t force your visitors to download 100kb javascript files because you can’t program.
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Hi, my name is olivier and I also have an addiction to mootools, and recently I ran into the same problem for a small client site: ending with a 40kb file just to ajaxify a form. I had been using mootools for so long I didn’t even remember how to make an ajax request.
I took a look at the source on jibberbook.com, and the addEvent function is great.
However, in the event function, i think that if you make it return false at the end, it will stop the event, no need to check for preventDefault or returnValue