Add InteractivityTo Your Site
JavaScript is a simplified programming language designed to beef up your website pages with interactive features. It gives you just enough programming muscle to add some fancy effects, but not enough to cause serious damage if your code goes wonky. It’s perfect for creating pop-up windows, marquee-style scrolling text, and buttons that light up when visitors mouse over them.
The goal of this book isn’t to teach you all the details of Java-Script—instead, it’s to give you enough background so you can find great JavaScript code online, understand it well enough to make basic changes to the code, and then to paste it into your pages to get the results you want. Since the Web has dozens of JavaScript sites offering thousands of ready-made scripts for free, these basic skills can come in very handy.
Understanding JavaScript
The JavaScript language has a long history—it first hit the scene with the Netscape Navigator 2 browser in 1995, and Internet Explorer jumped on the bandwagon by adding JavaScript compatibility to IE version 3. Today, all modern browsers support Java-Script, and it’s become wildly popular as a result. However, some justifiably paranoid web visitors turn off JavaScript compatibility because malicious developers have, on occasion, used JavaScript-fueled agents to attack computers with pop-up ads and other types of browser annoyances. That means that the best rule of thumb with JavaScript is to use it to improve your pages, but make sure ...
