A WebApp Starter Activity

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Updated 2014-03-01: This "tool" was created while I was teaching myself JavaScript, and it's an example of my own informal learning, a play-based way to spark an interest in this 21st century literacy, I hope. When you type your message in the left panel, fill out the form, press the buttons, save it as shown, and then compare the panels to see what's going on with the code it may just give you ideas to do bigger, better things.

A teacher might try this on their own first and work it into a class activity later. An individual might turn it into a report or project and get their classmates and teacher to view it on a cell phone [add video]. Comment on my blog for help or to make suggestions.

If you "view source" on the tool itself you'll see it's more of my own informal learning process; some of it's code I wrote when I was discovering jQuery circa 2007. At the time I was a competent ColdFusion/MySQL programmer discovering on my own how "object-oriented" was a more compact way to do what I was already doing with things like CURSOR and <cffunction></cffunction>. I think it's instructive—because it does actually work (!) and a) I very much did things the long way so I could see them, and b) I've "commented" the code heavily so it makes my thinking visible.

This is all part of a bigger plan See an example of a "Web App page" made with this tool here. For best results use Chrome, Safari, or Firefox 3.6+. For bad results use a Microsoft browser. If you have no choice the videos for IE9 are here because IE9 can't figure out what they are dynamically (view source, find the function that opens them for everyone else and see comments).

Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H to hide this. If it doesn't work, please debug it for me and send me a fix ;)