Web Gratitude

This week I really got down to working on the website project for class. I spent hours on the cataloging interface page and created many text boxes for the advanced search features. Nick and I had decided that anything that was beyond the scope of the class would just be represented with an image rather than functional code, but I can't help it... I had working text boxes and I wanted to add the feature Nick and I planned on in the mockups -- dynamic default text that disappears when the user clicks on the box, and reappears if the user leaves the box without entering anything. It was relatively easy to find a tutorial that would walk me through the steps of creating my own code of having the text disappear on focus, but I couldn't get the text to reappear when the user left the box empty and clicked outside the box (or in another box).

This whole week I turned over the problem in my head, doing research on my lunch break. I would go to bed at night, and I couldn't stop thinking about html -- my wife even made up an html-related lullaby to try to keep my head from exploding.

Then I stumbled upon the onblur attribute of the input element, and I knew I'd found the mate the the onfocus attribute that I'd already used to clear the default text from the box. Over several hours last night, I tweaked my guesses at the code until it worked -- effectively by reversing the code for the onfocus event. Here's the working box.

This whole week, devoted to getting text to disappear and reappear in a box, gave me a new respect for web developers and how complicated it is the code all the fancy tricks that I take for granted as a web user. All that little stuff that creates a positive user experience is a lot of time and effort!