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JavaScript jQuery Basics (2014) Creating a Simple Lightbox Creating and Appending Detached DOM elements

Oğulcan Girginc
Oğulcan Girginc
24,848 Points
Posted by Oğulcan Girginc
Oğulcan Girginc
24,848 Points

Creating and Appending Detached DOM elements

Hi,

Why do we not append $dismissButton to body like we have done before? Why the correct answer of this challenge is;

$modal.append($dismissButton);

but not;

$("body").append($dismissButton);

The code used in challenge:

js/app.js 
//Create the Modal
var $modal = $("<div id='modal'></div>");

//Create a placeholder for text in the modal
var $placeHolder = $("<p id='placeHolder'></p>");
$modal.append($placeHolder);

//Create a button to dismiss modal and att it to modal
var $dismissButton = $("<button>Dismiss</button>");

//Hide modal when button is pressed
$dismissButton.click(function(){
  $modal.hide(300);
});

$("body").append($modal);

//A function to show a modal
function displayModal(message) {
  $placeHolder.text(message);
  $modal.show();
}

//Show an example modal
displayModal("Hello World!");
index.html 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" title="no title" charset="utf-8">
    <title>Modal Example</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Modal Example Page</h1>

    <script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.0.min.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>
    <script src="js/app.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>
</body>
</html>

1 Answer

Vance Rivera
Vance Rivera
18,322 Points
Vance Rivera
Vance Rivera
18,322 Points

You are appending the dismiss button to the modal because it is part of the modal popup. When you are creating a modal or any other html dom object using javascript if you separate the elements into there own variable you will need to eventually put them together before you add the element to the body. In this case you are creating a modal with a dismiss button. So the first thing to do would be to create the main modal element container then you would want to construct other helping elements that are related to the finished modal and append them to the modal container. Once you have the modal completely built in javascript all you would have to do is append the main modal to the body of your html.

Cheers!