Display Images Horizontally Without Auto Wrap
Update (12/12/2010): I wrote a jQuery snippet to animate the scrollbar to be more interactive.
Introduction
The images, like text, will automatically wrap to the next line if you don’t apply any styles. In order to prevent that, I believe that most of you use table to solve this issue. Using the table to do the horizontal images layout is easy, you just apply the multiple <td> tags in a single <tr> row. However, this type of table usage is not recommended. According to HTML, CSS, and Javascript from the Ground Up from Google Code University, HTML is used as the structure for the document whereas CSS is used as the presentation for the document. In this case, HTML is used as the presentation of the document which is against the rule. Therefore the code becomes not as clean as the structured document. In order to convert this to CSS, you need to follow the structure and CSS below.
The Source Code
HTML:
<div id=""> <img src="" alt="" /> <img src="" alt="" /> <img src="" alt="" /> <img src="" alt="" /> </div>
CSS:
#div {
white-space:nowrap;
overflow-x:scroll; /* Use this if you want to scroll through only the images instead of the entire document, otherwise it's optional */
}
The Comparison
Here are the examples of before and after applying the styles:
Before
After
If you want more information about white-space CSS property, refer to the W3Schools website.
Do you often use tables for the structure or the presentation of the HTMLÂ document? Discuss in the comments section below.
P.S. Google Code University has lots of free courses/lectures raging from web programming and web security to web design and other web-related areas. It is a good place to start learning the essentials for each of these skills.
Site Menu Animation Prototype
I have been playing around with MooTools recently and came up with an idea to allow users to change the orientation of the menu for my updated site with animation. MooTools is an Object Oriented JavaScript framework similar to jQuery. The main reason I chose this framework instead of jQuery is that it can easily create customized animations. Although I’m still learning how to use MooTools’ full features, I wrote a HTML page that toggles between vertical and horizontal menu with custom animations just by using MooTools framework. Note that this is a prototype to the upcoming updated site menu. It only contains the background color and doesn’t contain any content. Here is the MooTools code for the page:
window.addEvent("domready", function() {
$('hori').setStyle('opacity','0');
$("change").addEvent("click", function() {
$('change').setStyles({
'visibility':'hidden',
'opacity':0
});
var changeMenu = new Fx.Tween($('menu'));
changeMenu.start('width','50px')
.chain(function() {
changeMenu.start('height','400px');
})
.chain(function() {
changeMenu.start("left", "10px");
})
.chain(function() {
changeMenu.start("top", "40px");
})
.chain(function() {
$('hori').fade('in');
});
return false;
});
$("hori").addEvent("click", function() {
$('hori').setStyles({
'visibility':'hidden',
'opacity':0
});
var changeMenu = new Fx.Tween($('menu'));
changeMenu.start("top", "50px")
.chain(function() {
changeMenu.start("left", "100px");
})
.chain(function() {
changeMenu.start('height','50px');
})
.chain(function() {
changeMenu.start('width','600px');
})
.chain(function() {
$('change').fade('in');
});
return false;
});
});
Notice that I used CSS property names and MooTools functions to create animations. You can view the whole source code by right-click the prototype page since it is just a plain HTML and JavaScript page.
I created this prototype with the help of MooTools 1.2 Beginner’s Guide and MooTools Docs.
HTML Template PHP class
This is my first fully-written PHP class to ease my HTML page creation process by pre-set the DOCTYPE and other required tags in a normal HTML page. The class is inspired by this article where it talks about wp_header and wp_footer of WordPress. I thought that this is a great exercise to increase my OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) skill. Therefore I wrote the following code based on my creation habit for HTML pages:
<?php
class template {
public $title;
public $style;
function header($headerContent="") {
echo "<!doctype html>n";
echo "<html>n";
echo "<head>n";
echo "<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8' />";
echo "<title>";
echo $this->title;
echo "</title>n";
if (isset($this->style) || !empty($this->style)) {
echo "<link href='{$this->style}' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' />n";
}
// Output additional header content if available
if (function_exists($headerContent)) {
$headerContent();
}
echo "</head>n";
}
function body($bodyContent="") {
echo "<body>n";
// Output body content
if (function_exists($bodyContent)) {
$bodyContent();
}
}
function script($script='') {
if (strstr($script, ".js") || strstr($script, "://")) {
echo "<script type='text/javascript' src='{$script}'></script>n";
}
else {
if (strstr($script, "()")) {
$function = str_replace("()", "", $script);
if (function_exists($function)) {
$function();
}
}
else {
echo "<script type='text/javascript'>n";
echo $script;
echo "</script>n";
}
}
}
function footer($footerContent="") {
if (function_exists($footerContent)) {
$footerContent();
}
echo "</body>n";
echo "</html>n";
}
}
?>
The header, body, and footer methods include an optional string variable. As you can see in the code above, this variable needs to be a function name. The function name in these three methods doesn’t require parentheses. However, the function name needs to have parentheses in the script method. The script method is different from the above three methods as it can be reused in the same HTML page. For example, the following is a simple page with the class applied:
<?php
$ca282 = new template();
$ca282->title = "Robby Chen CA 282";
$ca282->style = "styles/global.css";
$ca282->header("headerContent");
$ca282->body("bodyContent");
$ca282->script("http://www.google.com/jsapi");
$ca282->script("google.load('jquery','1')");
$ca282->script("jquery()");
$ca282->footer();
?>
Notice that the script method has three formats in the above example, external JS, on-line code, and a function. I didn’t pre-set the script tag between function because I need the syntax highlighting and auto-completion features in NetBeans. The following is my jquery() function in case you don’t know how to activate these two features within a PHP function:
<?php
function jquery() {
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$("#logo").html("Logo");
});
</script>
<?php
}
?>
Basically, the JavaScript code is outside the php tag but inside the PHP function. This way the script content will only appear after the jquery function is called.
You can download the class file here.