Adobe Edge Animate: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Controlling Your Animations with JavaScript and jQuery

If you worked on some of the examples in Chapter 5, you’ve already dabbled in JavaScript and jQuery. When Animate creates triggers and actions, it produces JavaScript/jQuery code. Modern browsers all understand this code, and it works universally, unless someone has explicitly turned JavaScript off. Like the CSS code mentioned in Chapter 7, JavaScript can be interspersed within the HTML code for a web page, or a separate JavaScript (.js) file can be can be linked to the page.

This chapter isn’t meant to be a complete study of JavaScript and jQuery, but it is meant to help you get started. You’ll learn how to read the code that Animate produces, and you’ll learn how you can tweak that code to customize your Animate compositions. Throughout, you’ll find tips and techniques that help solve common issues when you’re working in Animate. This chapter focuses mostly on JavaScript and jQuery theory. Chapter 9 explains how to put this theory into action.

A Very Brief History of JavaScript and jQuery

Once upon a time (in the 1990s), there was a company called Netscape, which delivered one of the first widely used web browsers, Netscape Navigator. Soon, the company was in a death battle with another company called Microsoft, which put forth a competing browser called Internet Explorer. In an effort to keep a competitive edge over their nemesis, some Netscape wizards developed a scripting language that could be used to add automation ...