Examples of functionality that should be implemented at the client-side

What can you do using client side programming?

Think of a web page, you want to beautify the page by adding some effects, so that if the user takes the mouse over a particular link, that link highlights or if the user takes the mouse over an image, that image changes, or grows in size. You can implement these interactive features using client-side programming.

As you have observed how important client-side programming can be when you are designing a web based solution. Here is a list of functionality that you can implement using client-side programming

• Display the browser name and version number
• Change the text in the status bar (the bar at the bottom of the browser, currently your browser status bar should say ‘done’) of the browser. You can also implement an animation in the status bar.
• Use a message box to display text to the user
• Change the title of the browser window (the blue bar at the top of your browser)

Other examples of client side programming are

Lets say you are developing a website for a mathematics school of the university, now they have asked you to implement a calculator, which will convert from inches to centimetres, this is another good example of client side programming.

If you are developing a news website, the most important thing in a news website apart from the news being reliable, is that the news should be updated, now if one wants to display the current date and time on the web page, if you are only using HTML, you can’t display the current time, and if you have to display the date, you would have to change all the pages each day and write the new date in the HTML page, you can do this using a client side programming language with just a few lines of code.

You can implement text animations using client side scripts, the animations can be like scrollers, tickers, cursor trailers (some characters follow your mouse when you move it on the screen), marquees (the text moves to and fro in a line). You can also change the font-attributes, styles and size, on the fly (What ever you design in HTML is static, once the HTML is written, the text would always have the same look, but if you want to change the font size when the page has been loaded in you browser, you can’t do it using HTML, you can implement this dynamic functionality using client-side programming.

If one wants to present their information in a very content rich pattern, you can use client side programs like Flash & Java Applets to present your information.

It is one of the good features of a website to have a search facility, so that the user can search within the website for a specific piece of information. You can add a full featured search engine to your website, using a client side programming language.

Client-side programming is also very helpful in designing a good interface for a website. You can implement a button which one can use just the browser back button. One can implement a menu in the website using a client-side programming language (e.g. Microsoft.com).

You can write your own text-based games for the Internet, which execute at the client-side.