Implementing Events

After reading through the chapter 3 times and then doing the worksheet I was finally ready to try and attach some of the code to my website. Big mistake. The first things that i encountered is trying to understand what the programs were doing. I can go through and read the text and follow along and get a semi clear understanding of what is being done. But to try and think through the problem and come up with the code on my own seems to be an eternity away not to mention a few trillion brain cells that i don't have. The more i work through the problems in the book the more that i realize that working with a library that you understand is vitally important. In fact most of the techniques and lessons in the book seem to depend upon the core.js library as its backbone. This is a little frustrating because there are a lot of different libraries out there. So you have to learn how to use each different library that you come across. The other problem that i have found is trying to remember the massive amount of information and concepts being thrown at me. The chapters are deceptively complex. As far as implementing the tooltip and the accordion list i found multiple problems with both. First of i decided to put them on my main webpage. So I had to adapt the CSS to work within what i had already set up which wasn't to tough. But there is still a problem of the tooltip displaying underneath the other links on the page. I cant figure out how to get the tips to display on top of the link underneath it on the page. The other problem i found was with the accordion. I made the ul list according to how the book specified but then i had to spend three hours messing around with the CSS in order to get it to display anything at all. And after it was all said and done the result was a 20 px padding set on the ul that no matter how hard I think I cant figure out how to get rid of. This is going to bother me until i get an answer.

The DOM

Well the bad thing about the W3C website is I'm not sure what they are saying most of the time. But from what i could recognize as far as terminology the DOM is not just a page structure that javascript can interact with but a platform for providing interactivity between clients and servers. The importance of the DOM for web development is very important since HTML and CSS is designed to use the Document Object Model. The DOM creates objects that can then be manipulated changed using scripting languages (i think). So as far as importance the W3C website said that there are more languages that are working on implementing ways of using the DOM structure to interact with the objects on the page. So from what i can tell if you want to know what the future will hold for web development you better be familiar with the DOM.

For Browser developers they need to correctly interpret the DOM in order to create a browser that supports and correctly implements W3C standards. If a browser interprets the nodes differently then the page will display differently. The DOM provides a standard way of viewing the elements of a web page and they provide a way for scripting languages such as javascript and html to display their content in a standardized format. 

The importance of following the W3C standards is paramount if you want your browser to be compliant. 

My personal opinion on the DOM is that i don't have an opinion yet. I haven't seen enough about it to fully understand its downfalls or potentials. As far as JavaScript the DOM seems to be the whole point of having JavaScript. Without the tree structure and the nodes within that tree it appears that the whole web thing would go up in smoke. So I'm definitely looking forward to learning more about it. And from what i was able to understand it seems that the object model used by the DOM is being used by other languages as a way of setting up page structures for other programs. But i could be wrong (don't know much aboot them thar programifcations thingings).