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Simon Willison’s Weblog

My first SitePoint article

Enhancing Structural Markup with JavaScript is my first published article for SitePoint, a web development portal that is also home to some of the best web design forums on the web. I’ve been a big fan of SitePoint for a number of years and it’s great to finally have contributed something to the site. The article discusses two methods of building useful Javascript effects on top of well structured markup and is based on my easytoggle and blockquote citations experiments, both previously featured on this blog.

Associated trivia: The dopey looking photograph the accompanies my profile was taken outside a youth hostel in Amsterdam earlier this year.

Posted 11th December 2003 at 2:03 am

This is My first SitePoint article by Simon Willison, posted on 11th December 2003.

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9 comments

  1. Congratulations, Simon – excellent, excellent stuff.

    Ethan - 11th December 2003 02:45 - #

  2. Congratulations, Simon

    Couldn't have said it better myself

    Matt.

    Matt - 11th December 2003 10:27 - #

  3. I don't know whether that was a pun or not. Though typically the orange tint tends to make most people look like a cross between the tango man and someone suffering from some form of tropical disease.

    Robert Wellock - 11th December 2003 11:15 - #

  4. There seems to be a slight problem with the articles demo. The actual .js file is missing. You probably know about it already :) Nice writing btw.

    Andri Sigurðsson - 11th December 2003 11:28 - #

  5. Very cool looking pic Simon. Moving on to the big time I see. Tell us are there any benefits to trying to get an article posted on Sitepoint?

    Scrivs - 11th December 2003 14:32 - #

  6. Congratulations on your SitePoint publication! I wrote an earlier article on JavaScript generated HTML. It seems that I've stirred up quite a controversy amongst the JavaScript pundits who maintain that document.write (rather than the dom's createElement) reliance is essentially "wrong" somehow. My upcoming follow-up article will reveal my function factory technique by which I defined all 288 of those dom-wrong functions. Responding to reader feedback (like yours), I now intend to show how this technique can be applied to the generation of dom-right function a library!

    Rick Renfrow - 11th December 2003 19:24 - #

  7. Nice one! Have you considered writing some stuff about Python BTW? Python get's exactly zero time right now at Sitepoint, both on the forums and from authors.

    Harry Fuecks - 12th December 2003 19:38 - #

  8. Congrats and nice job Simon.

    But in your citation script, why not include a title attribute in the blockquote and then set the anchor's title attribute to that rather than to the value of cite?

    Or, alternatively, keep it as it is, but set the anchor text to the value of the blockquote title attribute, instead of the generic "Source"?

    Lars - 13th December 2003 14:48 - #

  9. Lars: I considered that, but I'm not a big fan of adding title attributes to large block level elements like blockquotes and paragraphs because it results in a large and unwieldy "hot spot" for triggering the associated tool-tip, which could end up confusing people while adding little value to the real page. Of course, the Javascript could remove the title attribute from the blockquote and add it on to the generated Source link in which the tool-tip problem would go away, but it would still be there for users with Javascript disabled.

    Simon Willison - 13th December 2003 16:47 - #

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Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/12/11/sitepoint

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