HTML, XHTML & CSS

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Part IV: Scripting and (X)HTML
Unlike preceding examples, Listing 16-3 has a section in both the
head and the body:
✓ Cookies are read and written in the header script when the page loads.
✓ The body script dynamically writes out the contents of the page itself.
Follow these steps to add the cookie-handling script to your page:
1. Copy both sections and put them into the appropriate parts
of your page.
2. Change the section to contain the text that you want the page
to display.
The lines inside the document.write() statements write the text out
to the document on the fly.
A cookie has an expiration date, after which it’s no longer available. This
example creates cookies that expire in six months. If you want your cookies
to live longer (or not so long), adjust the JavaScript code near the top that
sets a value for expireDate. Thus, the following example increases the current
expiration date by six months:
expireDate.setMonth(expireDate.getMonth()+6)
Working with jQuery and FancyBox Lightbox
In days of yore, it was commonplace to use browser pop-ups to present additional
information about your Web site. In fact, we even used this technique
in the last edition of this book. Owing to overuse at some unscrupulous
Web sites, plus their annoying in-your-face nature, pop-ups are now mostly
blocked by major browsers . . . and that’s probably a good thing!
Instead of pop-ups, we now recommend using lightboxes. This may sound
like a weapon out of Star Wars or a tool used by photographers (that last
guess is close). In this case, however, a lightbox is a tool that displays images,
HTML content, and multimedia atop of a Web page.
Dozens of different lightboxes are available on the Internet. Please use your
favorite search engine to check those out if you want to know more. Here, we
only discuss jQuery and FancyBox.
If you’re unfamiliar with jQuery, think of it as a popular JavaScript library
that you can reference without writing much real code yourself. (We don’t
dig much into jQuery in this book, but you need only do a Web search on this