JavaScript® Bible, Seventh Edition

Chapter 51. Internet Explorer Behaviors

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Introducing IE behaviors

• Understanding the structure of behavior XML files

• Exploring behavior samples

Back in the days of Internet Explorer 5 for Windows, Microsoft first introduced a technology known as DHTML behaviors, which added enhanced features to the behaviors familiar to standard HTML elements. Microsoft and others have proposed the behaviors concept to the W3C, and it could someday become one of the W3C standard recommendations. Such a standard might not be implemented exactly the way Microsoft has implemented behaviors, but most of the concepts are the same, and the syntax being discussed so far is similar. While there is no guarantee that the W3C will adopt behaviors as a standard, you will see that the concept seems to be a natural extension to the work that has already been adopted for both CSS and XML.

Although the W3C did initiate an effort called Behavioral Extensions to CSS, there hasn't been much progress on the behavior standardization front recently. For the latest document describing the work of the participants of the standards discussions, visit http://www.w3.org/TR/becss.

Style Sheets for Scripts

You can best visualize what a behavior is in terms of the way you use style sheets. Consider a style sheet rule whose selector is a tag or a class name. The idea behind the style sheet is that one rule, which can define dozens of rendering characteristics for a chunk of HTML content, can be applied to perhaps dozens, ...