W5: Class and Readings

Class: Document Object Model (DOM) and More JavaScript

This week's classes we learned about DOM. DOM provides a structural representation of a document, viewing HTML as a tree of elements. DOM also provides us a collection of JavaScript objects, properties and methods. I didn't know about DOM, interesting to see this representation for HTML and XML.
We then saw a picture gallery example with Javascript. Then we saw more Javascript: Events, Forms, Variables. Then we saw Cookies. Nothing too exiting to me. I've seen it before.

Reading 1: JavaScript Tutorial: W3C DOM Introduction

Easy and straight forward DOM tutorial. It deepened the DOM material exposed on class that was more of a theory introduction. This guide had also a practical approach so I could see all the DOM tools in action. I never knew this existed. I ended up reading not only the W3C DOM introduction, but: DOM nodes and tree, DOM tables, DOM CSS, DOM events, DOM objects and methods

Reading 2: Mastering Ajax, Part 4: Exploiting DOM for Web Response

As the author says, I learned that the only thing that is unchangeable and unalterable and users can't mess with it on a webpage is the markup. The article underlines the proper meaning of markup as an organization. The article is mainly theory, the first half being a xhtml review. The exercises helped apply the tree structure theory. I liked how by the last part we get to DOM, but undestanding a lot more of the implementation.

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

Offered optimal solutions to common problems within the specific context of AJAX. The code is done for us to use.