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How practical are ranges

How practical are ranges?

The dissimilarities between the DOM and IE range implementations make it difficult to create cross-

browser solutions, which is perhaps why many developers shy away from using ranges at all. When

evaluating your own usage, it’s important to understand your target audience, what browsers they will

be using, and if there is a nonrange way to create the same effect.

Ranges can provide very useful functionality on Web pages. Some pages use ranges to highlight certain

words on a page based on a series of search terms, so the user can easily find the words he or she is

searching for. Another use, popular among advertisers, is to turn certain words into links (for instance,

turning the word

computer

into a link to a computer manufacturer or the word

JavaScript

to a description

of the language).

Summary

This chapter introduced several new ways to manipulate a document’s DOM tree.

First, you learned how to affect the CSS style of elements on a Web page. Several examples were dis-

cussed, including hover effects and custom tooltips. You learned how to access the style definitions of

elements as well as CSS rules, and in doing so, saw their difference from computed styles.

The next section introduced

innerText

innerHTML

outerText

, and

outerHTML

. You learned how

innerText

can be used to change the text content of a DOM element and how

innerHTML

can be used

to change the HTML content of a DOM element. Likewise, you learned how

outerText

and

outerHTML

can be used to replace a DOM element altogether (either with plain text or HTML code, respectively).

Lastly, you learned about ranges. The differences between DOM ranges and ranges in Internet Explorer

were discussed, and several examples were given to show the similarities between the two.

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