I am right now in Atlanta, Georgia for the Georgia Tech University Hack and one of the hot technologies we want to have students hack on is geolocation. To this end, I have given a talk on geo hacking:

As a follow-up to the talk and to make it easier for students to build geo hacks rather than battling the different APIs, I’ve put together a small JavaScript library that fulfills a lot of geo hacking needs:

• Detecting the visitor’s location with the W3C geo API and with IP as a fallback
• Find geo location from text
• Find location from lat/lon pair
• Find locations in a certain web document (by URL)
• Get the location for a certain IP number

Check out the YQL Geo Library demo page and get the YQL Geo Library source on GitHub.

During the course I am currently giving in Sunnyvale on basics of the DOM and progressive enhancement I asked the attendees which methods seem to be missing in the native DOM implementation and this is what we came up with:

• createLink(url,text) – a shortcut method to create a link with a text node inside – something you constantly have to do when creating interfaces
• insertAfter(newNode,oldNode) – there is an insertBefore, but no insertAfter
• removeNode(node) – the native removeChild is convoluted
• textElement(elementName,text) – it seems not necessary to create an Element, then create a text node and apply it, this could be one step
• addScript(url) – to lazy-load JavaScripts
• normalizeNode(node) – to remove those pesky line-breaks that interfere with nextSibling or previousSibling
• getText(node) – retrieving the text content of a node that is either a text or an element node
• setText(node,text) – setting the text regardless of node type

I asked the attendees to come up with a method each and to present them, here’s what we got:

jukuhelpers = function(){

function createLink(url,text,cssClass){

var link =  document.createElement(‘a’);

if (typeof url = 'string'){

link.setAttribute('href', url);

}

	
if (typeof text = ‘string’){

link.appendChild(document.createTextNode(text));

}
	
if (typeof cssClass = 'string'){

link.className = cssClass;

}
	
return link;

}
	
function insertAfter(newNode,oldNode){

oldNode.nextSibling

? oldNode.parentNode.insertBefore(newNode, oldNode.nextSibling)

: oldNode.parentNode.appendChild(newNode);

}
	
function removeNode(node){

if (node) {

node.parentNode.removeChild(node);

}
	
}

function textElement(elementName,text){

if (typeof text = ‘string’){

var txtElement = document.createElement(elementName);

var txtNode = document.createTextNode(text);

txtElement.appendChild(txtNode);

}
	
return txtElement;

}
	
function addScript(url){

var s = document.createElement(‘script’);

s.setAttribute(‘type’, ‘text/javascript’);

s.setAttribute(‘src’, url);

var head = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)[0];

head.appendChild(s);

}
	
function getText(node){

var txt;

if (node && node.nodeType = 1) {

if (node.hasChildNodes()) {

txt = node.firstChild.nodeValue;

}
	
}

if (node && node.nodeType = 3) {

txt = node.nodeValue;

}
	
return txt;

}
	
function setText(node,text){

if (node && node.nodeType = 1) {

if (node.hasChildNodes()) {

node.firstChild.nodeValue = text;

}
	
else {

node.appendChild(document.createTextNode(text));

}
	
}

if (node && node.nodeType = 3) {

node.nodeValue = text;

}
	
}

function normalizeNode(node){

if(node.hasChildNodes){

var spaceTest = /^s+$/;

var children = node.childNodes;

for(var i=0;children[i];i++){

if(children[i].nodeType === 3){

if(spaceTest.test(children[i].nodeValue)){

children[i].parentNode.removeChild(children[i]);

}
	
}

}
	
}

}
	
return{

createLink:createLink,

insertAfter:insertAfter,

removeNode:removeNode,

textElement:textElement,

addScript:addScript,

getText:getText,

setText:setText,

normalizeNode:normalizeNode

}
	
}();

You can get the jukuhelpers.js file if you want to use it yourself.

Anything else that is missing or any bugs in this?