Development Cycle

The jQuery tableSorter script is one of those indispensable scripts for a web developer, as most applications have a need to display tabular data to the user at some place in their application. The problem is displaying this data in some sort of user friendly format.

The main problem is tables filled with data are commonly very long. Forcing the user to scroll around the page in search of the rows they are looking for is not an optimium situation.

The jQuery plugin tableSorter makes this process a lot easier, it is easy to include in your pages, its extendable, works on all the major browsers and allows client side sorting of the data by the end user on the columns of their choice.

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Adjusting the visibility of element within a web page comes in handy from time to time for features like tool tips, extending content after a short excerpt etc. This technique adds greatly to the user experience of your site and has been around for a long time but the jQuery library makes this task a lot easier with the hide method.

To get started if you haven’t already load the jQuery library into the head of your page i.e

Source code

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript">

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HTML 5 brings many new features to the browser including a lot of enhancements to the way forms are created and handled. One of my favourite features is the introduction of the placeholder attribute, this allows the display of  some text in a text input field or text area until the element is brought into focus. This allows the addition of small tips or related prompts to give the user a better understanding of what is required as input.
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