December 22, 1999 - Scriptlet Authoring | WebReference

December 22, 1999 - Scriptlet Authoring

Yehuda Shiran December 22, 1999
Scriptlet Authoring
Tips: December 1999

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

A scriptlet is an independent script that is referenced from an HTML page. It represents an object that accepts data from the outside and supports several operations on this data. A scriptlet describes the behavior of an object and the event it is triggered by. A scriptlet also allows you to define new events. Scriptlets are supported by Internet Explorer 4.0 and up and are not supported by Netscape Navigator. Internet Explorer 5.0 added the support for Behaviors to scriptlets. A scriptlet resides in a file of its own, with extension .sct. A scriptlet file opens with a <SCRIPTLET> tag and closes with a </SCRIPTLET> tag:

<SCRIPTLET>......</SCRIPTLET>

A scriptlet is divided into two parts: the interface definition section and the internal implementation section. The interface definition section includes IMPLEMENTS tags. Each IMPLEMENTS tag opens with <IMPLEMENTS> and closes with </IMPLEMENTS>. There are two types of <IMPLEMENTS> tags: <Behavior> and <Automation>. The <Behavior> type specifies the event associated with the Behavior, such as the following:

<IMPLEMENTS ID="kuku" TYPE="Behavior" DEFAULT>
<EVENT NAME="onFifthBlink"/>
</IMPLEMENTS>

The Automation type of the <IMPLEMENTS> tag specifies the scriptlet's object interface parameters and supported methods:

<IMPLEMENTS TYPE="Automation">
<METHOD NAME="blink"/>
<PROPERTY NAME="x"/>
<PROPERTY NAME="y"/>
</IMPLEMENTS>

The internal implementation section consists of a JavaScript script. This script implements the internal details of the object's methods. As seen above, only one method is defined, the blink() function. The whole internal implementation can be found in Column 22, Scriptlet Authoring.