theChrisWalker.net

I wanted this functionality for a project a while ago. I google’d and found that lots of others did too, but no one had done it. Or at least not in a way that I could understand. In fact, I’m not sure I completely understand it anymore. It works very well, but also it could have some improvement. I would like to be able to drag the mouse to create a selection, but this in itself poses the difficultly of how to distinguish a “drag-to-move” from a “drag-to-select”.

Still I found it an interesting proof-of-concept and maybe you will too. The test can be found here: Select and Drag Demo.

A little while back I was working on a project and wanted a selectbox to look a bit more pretty, but with complete backwards compatibility with regular select boxs.

I.E. If I already had a select box on the page, and it had various JavaScript events hanging off it already, I wanted that to function still but I wanted the box to be prettier.

The first idea was to use CSS to just style the box. But then I realised that each browser and OS has it’s own different way of rendering the controls. So I turned to JavaScript, and the always useful jQuery library. I wrote a plugin that will immediately transform any selectboxes into prettier ones, allows icons for the options, all with valid xhtml and works completely fine with JavaScript (or the plugin) disabled. Pretty cool, eh?

Well, I put the original demo page I designed for it back online, so check out the plugin!.