lecture 8: what not to do

When people first discover the JavaScript source they sometimes get carried away. Remember that with almost no exceptions, everything you could do with JavaScript is at best an add-on to your site - at worst, it could utterly ruin what until then was a decent, simple site. Please remember the following at all times:

• Your web site is your space. Make sure the script is appropriate before you use it: for instance, the "colour picker" on the last slide clearly has application to a web design site so was worth using. Throwing someone else's script onto an otherwise carefully-designed, personal site can be a rather disorienting experience.
• Scripts tend to come bundled up with HTML, sometimes a great deal of it (if you didn't look at the source code for the colour picker, return there and do so now). There is no guarantee this is valid HTML (or XHTML) and in any case it may still need modification to fit the style and structure of your page.
• Not every browser can handle JavaScript. Never make the functioning of a page or site dependent on the JavaScript. Always provide some other means of accessing essential information.
• Some of the scripts available on these source sites are true crimes against the Web. Please, please please never include scripts that cause swirly things, clocks, etc. to follow people's cursor around; that cause web pages to load with "fade-in" effects (unless you only do this the first time the page loads); that play sounds; or that in any way make your site a more difficult, cluttered place to visit.

And one more important word of warning for you as an ACOM student. Neither I nor demonstrators can help you fix other people's scripts if for whatever reason they do not work. If you've tried some of the events or simple scripts given on this site, fair enough - but we won't fix problem scripts downloaded from elsewhere.