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Andy's JavaScript tutorial 2

Dynamically changing the document's background color

Ok, let's begin by seeing how to change the background color of the document using JavaScript. Take a look:

<script>
document.bgColor="blue"
</script>

You can change blue to any color name, or the color's hex representation (ie: #000000).

This is a very simple illustration of JavaScript at work; changing the background color isn't exactly something good-old HTML can't do easily all by itself. However, this is just the beginning of our JavaScript journey...have some patience!

Status bar messages

Using JavaScript, you can display messages in the status bar of your browser below. This is accomplished by setting a string value to the "window.status" property. For example:

<script>
window.status="Welcome to my homepage"
</script>

By doing the above, the message "Welcome to my homepage" is shown in the status bar. One trick you may have seen on the web is a status bar message that is initiated only when the user moves her mouse over a link:

Yahoo

Here's the code used:

I captured the mouse's "position" by using the onMouseover and onMouseout event handlers of JavaScript. Event handlers are added directly inside certain HTML tags such as the <a> tag, and allows you to run code that react to a certain event (such as when the mouse moves over a link). In this case, the code displays "Click here for Yahoo!" in the status bar when the surfer moves her mouse over the link "Yahoo", and resets the status bar when the mouse moves out. Pretty cool, uh?

Text inside the document is usually static- if you reload this document 5 times, there's no reason to believe that the document's text will be any different each time...or is there? One of the coolest things about JavaScript is that it allows you to generate text on the fly. You could, for example, have the document greet you "Good morning" in the morning, and "Good night" at night. The basic way to write out text in JavaScript is by using the document.write() command, as follows:

Whatever you put inside the parentheses, JavaScript displays it on the page. Taking this basic idea one step further, I'll create a script that writes out the last modified date of this page.

<script>
var modifieddate=document.lastModified
document.write(modifieddate)
</script>

The above is a perfect example of "on-the-fly" text. The text  reflects the last modified date of your page, and is updated automatically whenever you edit the page and save it!

Andy's Tutorial 3>>