Have you heard about jQuery or JQuery UI? If not, you will. They are among the fastest spreading web technologies. With all the buzz about HTML 5, it is important to keep these two in mind. For this article, I will cover jQuery UI, which is a subset of jQuery.

This is how jQueryUI.com defines the technology: “jQuery UI provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications.”

What this really means: Some really smart people spent a lot of time creating reusable scripts that are essentially interface components (widgets). And they created a styling standard so it will be very easy to apply a style to a page full of these widgets.

They took the concept above a step further by providing a collection of themes and giving you a tool to customize these themes. This tool, called the Theme Roller, can be seen at jqueryui.com/themeroller. You can even plug the Theme Roller into Firefox and edit a style on a live site. How cool is that?

OK, getting to the point, why do technical communicators care?

Hidden in the descriptions above is the all-important mantra, “separate content from presentation.” jQuery UI is built on that principle. It doesn’t care what the content is. It only cares about how to present it to you. It is two primary parts: (1) Tools to help you interact with content and (2) style sheets to lay out and format the content. These elements live in separate files. They consume the content and they prefer XML.

So, technical communicators care because:

  • It is the latest/greatest web technology and most communicators need to publish on the web.
  • It gives true separation of content and presentation.
  • It is easy to use.
  • It looks great.

It is also worth mentioning that jQuery and jQuery UI are already very popular on the Web. A couple stats (from http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/):

  • Over 46% of the world’s websites us jQuery.
  • Almost a million websites use jQuery UI.

jQuery technology from ComponentOne:

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