t+1: Matt Wilson’s blog

I needed to toggle some text between “show help” and “hide help”.

First, I wrote this and thought I was good:

<style type="text/css">
span.hide { display:none }
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
    $("a.showhide").click(function (event) {
        $("span.show").toggle();
        $("span.hide").toggle();
        return false;
    })
});
</script>
<a class="showhide"><span class="show">Show Help</span><span class="hide">Hide Help</span></a>


That flips the text from “Show Help” to “Hide Help”. But the code can be made even shorter by calling toggle on both spans at once:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
    $("a.showhide").click(function (event) {
        $("a.showhide span").toggle();
        return false;
    })
});
</script>


I heart jQuery.

I really like how tiny the library is. It is nice that I can use selectors to find nodes; for example, $(”li a”) will find all the anchors inside list elements. Furthermore, it seems really well documented. There’s not just one, but several real books all about jQuery available on amazon.

So, what am I overlooking? What’s the terrible secret of jQuery?

My wife keeps winning when we play scrabulous. So I wrote some performance-enhancing javascript here to close the gap.

The first time the page loads, you have to download the whole 1.4 mb word dictionary. Then your browser will cache that file locally, so future look-ups are really quick.

There’s at least one bug so far. When you submit your list of tiles like ABCDEFG and your pattern B..Y.. I make a regular expression object where I replace each dot with [ABCDEFG]. So that means I’m not keeping track of how many of each tile you have. If the BGGYGG were a real word, then my function would suggest it, even though this is clearly impossible.

Along with fixing that bug, I want to make a few improvements:

• Figure out how to make this into a firefox extension.
• Display the score next to each word suggestion.