25 Code Snippets for Web Designers (Part7)
October 26, 2007 by Oli · 11 Comments
Every web designer finds it handy to have a collection of code snippets such as JavaScript effects, pieces of html and widgets that they incorporate into their designs. Lets take a look at recent examples of these …
Live Validation – LiveValidation is a small open source JavaScript library built for giving users real-time validation information as they fill out forms
Javascript Progress Bar – Dynamic Unobtrusive JavaScript Progress/Percentage Bar
Ask the CSS Guy – Creating a table with dynamically highlighted columns like Crazy Egg’s pricing table
Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM – File inputs (<input type=”file” />) are the bane of beautiful form design. No rendering engine provides the granular control over their presentation designers desire. This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation
Fancy Form – FancyForm is a powerful checkbox replacement script used to provide the ultimate flexibility in changing the appearance and function of HTML form elements
Lavalamp for jQuery lovers – Hover menu built with A semantically correct HTML markup, A CSS to skin the markup and unobstrusive javascript
Fade Out Bottom – This is a cool effect where the bottom of the page seems to fade out. The technique makes use of an fixed position div (bottom: 0%) with a transparent PNG image and a high z-index value
Clean CSS – CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise
CSS Specificity – Apart from Floats, the CSS Specificity is one of the most difficult concepts to grasp in Cascading Stylesheets. The different weight of selectors is usually the reason why your CSS-rules don’t apply to some elements
Phat Fusion – Image menu using JavaScript, clicks to keep each menu item open and to close it again
XML and SWF Charts – XML/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic XML data
Date Input Calendar – Date Input Calendar is designed specifically to make entering date values into forms as easy as can be
Jibberbook – Free downloadable Ajax guest book
Prototype Fisheye – The idea behind a fisheye control is a strip of icons, being vertical or horizontally laid out that reacts to the user’s mouse as it approaches the icon
jQuery Password Strength Meter – The jQuery Password Strength Plugin allows you to show a visual aid for the strength of a users password. It is attached to a password field, and as the user types in their password, the plugin calculates a score based on the variety of different characters
jQuery UI – jQuery UI is a set of theme able widgets and interactions, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications
Nice Titles Revised – Mouseover Tool Tips
AutoSuggest – An AJAX auto-complete text field
Date Input Selection – The Datetime Toolbocks is a pure JavaScript library using DHTML and advanced date parsing to generate the date based on the grammar passed
Transparent Message – Transparent message is a new way to display information on a web page.
Instead of using the ugly alert() javascript function, it shows the message in a overlay layer of your HTML page
PJ Hyett – The Lightbox effect without Lightbox
jsGalScroll – The jQuery jsGalScroll Plugin allows you to take a grouping of images and turn them into a scrolling photo gallery with pagination
Ask the CSS Guy – Create a table like Orbitz’s airline flights scheduling and pricing matrix
CSS Dashboard Effect – Ever want to alert your users to a really important message? Ever care to have some effect that looked like dashboard?
Eswat – The ESWAT web project framework is a kit that contains a folder structure and some pre-written components that I use whenever I start off a new web project
































Very cool list. It seems we’ve coming to a time where the tasks of web designer and web developer (the tools you mentioned) are being done by a single person.
Seems like you’ve included quite a bit of AJAX in this section. It’s amazing what people can do graphically if they put their mind to just manipulating the simple html tags by taking advantage of the powerful javascript language!
That’s one of the better auto-suggest scripts I’ve seen – thanks. Like Patrick said, it’s getting easier for designers to implement these things, with or without knowing the scripting language involved (always helps to at least be able to creatively cut/paste).
Nice list. It’s too bad half of the examples don’t seem to work on Safari. I had to fire up Firefox to check many of the examples featured above. Not the greatest if you are trying to design/develop in cross-browser bliss.
This entire page has text smack up against the left edge of the window (Firefox on Mac OS X) which I find annoying and hard to read. Why does this happen? Can I fix it or is that up to you?