Skuunk Works

Back in the old days of inline JavaScript, people would often attach JavaScript functionality to links either by using: <a href="#" onclick="doSomeJavaScript()">Click Here</a> or by using <a href="javascript:doSomeJavaScript()">Click Here</a> Anyways, there are problems with both. In the first instance, the user will get booted up to the top of the page in some browsers (that's what href="#" basically does). The second instance is better, but it is inline and that is something we want to avoid. In the Unobtrusive JavaScript world we would basically have to use the first instance because the "a" tag will not display as underlined in some browsers without an "href" attribute. Or would we? I am not really sure where the metaphor for using links as actions came from, but as long as it is there and people are used to it we will often get designs from UI designers using them as such. Links are really supp...

One issue that has come up in using Unobtrusive JavaScript is how do you assign instance specific data to the element. For example, in the old days (pre UJ) you could iterate over a bunch of objects (each with it's own ID) and hard code the ID into the on{Event} attribute i.e. <% for item in items %> <div onclick="someFunction(<%= item.id %>)">Click here to select item</div> <% end %> But in UJ, on{Event} attributes are no longer considered good practice. If only there was a way we could somehow encode the id with the HTML like we could in Flex (Flex supports dynamic attributes on objects). You can assign a dynamic attribute using JavaScript, but putting a script tag into the loop seems very inelegant and against UJ principles. The other way would be to render all the objects in JavaScript first and then re-render them in HTML. This does seem rather wasteful in terms of processing however and full of index dependencies when you want to merge ...