I just came back from Stanford where I talked about Scripting Enabled, what lead to it, how I build Easy YouTube and generally how giving hack events and unconferences an accessiblity spin can rejuvenate the movement and drive innovation. The slides are available here and the video will follow once Stanford has finished captioning it.

[slideshare id=553629&doc=scriptingenabled-1218646262025037-8&w=425]

Next Thursday, the 14th of August I’ll be guest at Stanford University to give a talk about accessibility hacking and Scripting Enabled.

Get all the details on the Stanford Online Accessibility Program Site

This was a question from one of the attendees of my JavaScript course, and here is one solution:

 function getIDsAndClasses(elm,parent){
   var elm = elm || '*';
   if(typeof parent !== 'undefined'){
     if(typeof parent === 'string'){
       var parent = document.getElementById(parent) || document;
     }
   } else {
     var parent = document;
   }
   var elms = parent.getElementsByTagName(elm);
   var ids = [];
   var classesFilter = {};
   var i = elms.length;while(i--){
     if(elms[i].id !== ''){
       ids.push(elms[i].id);
     }
     if(elms[i].className !== ''){
       var singles = elms[i].className.split(' ');
       var j = singles.length;while(j--){
         classesFilter[singles[j]] = singles[j];
       }
     }
   }
   var classes = [];
   for(var i in classesFilter){
    classes[classes.length]=classesFilter[i];
   }
   return {ids:ids,classes:classes}
 }

You can call this method either with no parameters or filter it down by providing an element name and a parent element. The parent element could be a DOM reference or a string, both work.

In any case, the output is an object with a property of ids containing an array of ID names and a property called classes with an array of class names.

The script filters out duplicate classes and gets all applied classes – provided they are space separated.

You can see it in action (in the FireBug console) here: Test getIDsAndClasses

I tried using regex to get the IDs and classes, but that turned out to be a mess in JavaScript.

Any faster way?

My esteemed colleage Klaus Komenda seems to spend as much time as I do writing cool stuff for the masses, but somehow he doesn’t crop up in a lot of to-read lists. For shame, I say, pulling up my trousers until they reach my armpits (yes, I watched Simpsons) and I point you, esteemed reader to a series of articles explaining the YUI from ground up entitled Agent YUI:

• Get a lot of easy-to-understand YUI tutorials here

Yes, I am also taken with them as I like Bond a lot.

On the third day we went deeper into the oddities of the DOM and how to access and create content in the current document. One thing I realized very fast is that teaching DOM before the days of FireBug was much easier – you can lead the group from property to property and method to method. With FireBug they are much faster in finding out what can be done and also get a lot of goodies that FireFox provides but aren’t the standard.

We went through the basics – setAttribute and the differences when using it in comparison to the shorter property notation (MSIE sees expando properties as attributes and in order to remove them you’d have to null both the attribute and the object property).

We then moved on quickly to createElement and createTextNode and detected the need to apply them to the document somehow to make them appear.
This lead to insertBefore and appendChild and we discovered that there is no insertAfter, which is a logical fault in the DOM.
As a remedy I asked the group to write their own insertAfter, which is a good exercise to re-iterate looping through child nodes as well as using the creation methods. There are of course several methods of writing an insertAfter, but I was pretty much stunned to see one of the attendees to come up with one I hadn’t thought of:

function insertAfter(newElm,elm){
var clone = elm.cloneNode(true);
elm.parentNode.insertBefore(clone,elm);
elm.parentNode.replaceChild(newElm,elm);
}

I am not too sure about its performance, but I really like the logic of it: this way you can be sure the new node will be after the old one regardless of where the old node is (last node, first or somewhere in the middle). This also means you don’t need to fork and use insertBefore or appendChild respectively.

Other examples we went through were removing nodes with a certain class (to show the problem of the changing length when iterating over a nodeList and removing elements) and writing a simple form validation script that changes the labels of mandatory fields when they are empty.

I wrapped up the day using the JSON output of the del.icio.us API to write out a list of bookmarks and tags:

In an extra step I then asked the team that instead of calling the API in an own script tag to progressively enhance a link and create the script tag dynamically:

My Delicious Links

We then ranted a bit about the non-logic of DOM methods and their parameter order (“why is document.insertBefore(oldNode,newNode) not possible but instead we need oldNode.parentNode.insertBefore(newNode,oldNode)??”) and came up with a wishlist of DOM methods that should be native:

• createLink(url,text)
• insertAfter(newNode,oldNode) – consistent with the native DOM inconsistency
• removeNode(node)
• textElement(elementName,text)
• addScript(url)
• normalizeNode(node) – removing whitespace
• getText(node)
• setText(node,text)

This list is also the courses homework, and we’ll take a look at the results on Monday.