jQuery 1.4 Animation Techniques - Index of

Pop quiz – implementing proximity animations
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Chapter 8
1. We provided additional functionality by adding keyboard navigability in the previous
example, why?
a. For fun
b. To look good
c. To provide an alternate way for the content to be explored by
non-mouse users
d. Keyboard events must be bound whenever mouse events are used
2. Why should we avoid hardcoding 'magic' numbers into our scripts?
a. To make our code more readable
b. So that our scripts are less reliant on the content that they act upon
c. hardcoded integers take longer to process
d. Because jQuery prefers working with strings
Animated page headers
Another quite fashionable technique at the moment is to have an animation that runs in the
header of the page when the home page loads. Sometimes the animations run continually
on every page of the site; others run once on the home page only.
This technique is an easy and effective way to make your site stand out, and they needn't be
complex or heavily apparent animations; a short, subtle animation can be enough to add the
wow factor.
Earlier in the book we looked at using the new cssHooks functionality in conjunction with a
pre-written file that makes use of cssHooks, which extends jQuery's css() method to allow
an element's background-position style property to be animated. In this example, we'll
look at how we can do this manually without the use of the plugin.
Well-written plugins can be an effective and easy solution, but there are times when a plugin
adds much more functionality than we actually need and therefore increase a page's script
overhead. It's not often that reinventing the wheel is necessary or advised, but there can be
times when it's beneficial to write a custom script that does only what we require.