JavaScript® Bible, Sixth Edition

Chapter 48. Internet Explorer Behaviors

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Introducing IE behaviors

• Understanding the structure of behavior XML files

• Exploring behavior samples

Back in Internet Explorer 5 for Windows, Microsoft first introduced a technology known as DHTML behaviors, which added enhanced features to the standard behaviors familiar to standard HTML elements. Microsoft and others have proposed the behaviors concept to the W3C, and it could some day 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.

Stylesheets for Scripts

You can best visualize what a behavior is in terms of the way you use stylesheets. Consider a stylesheet rule whose selector is a tag or a class name. The idea behind the stylesheet is that one rule, which can define dozens of rendering characteristics of a chunk of HTML content, can be applied to perhaps dozens, if not ...