[thelist] Formatting On The Fly

[Ben Henick]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, Salvatore Palmisano wrote:

> Is it possible to apply text formatting on the fly, based on a user's mouse
> click?
> I have a series of radio buttons, and Id like when one is clicked on to set
> some text to red, and when the other is clicked, the same text to black.
> 
> Is this JS?  DHTML?  I have the CSS classes in place, but am at a loss about
> how to call them client-side.
> Thanks all.

Technically, it's DTHML.  Where the block-level element containing the
text you want to change is called 'ThatBlock':

IE:

document.all["ThatBlock"].style.color = "#ff0000";

or

document.all["ThatBlock"].style.color = "#000000";

W3C Clumsy:

ChangeIt = document.getElementById("ThatBlock");
ChangeIt.style.color = "#ff0000";
// and so forth

You can substitute the color codes with local variable names and put the
scripting inside of a function that supplies the color codes as arguments:

onclick="ChangeColor('#ff0000');"

This is a generally clumsy example, but should be adequate as a starting
point.  Something else I should point out is that changing a single style
attribute will not reset the other style values for that element, though
the change *can* be expected to cascade where appropriate.

...And because I've never written anything to swap out entire classes, I
can't be much help on the exact syntax for that approach (unless I spend
20 minutes at MSDN when I should be back in bed nursing my cold).


HTH,
-- 
Ben Henick
Web Author At-Large
http://www.io.com/persist1/
persist1 at io.com

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