December 11, 2000 - Moving Objects Horizontally

Yehuda Shiran December 11, 2000
Moving Objects Horizontally
Tips: December 2000

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

One of the trickiest task in DHTML is to move objects on the screen, browser-independently. Let's focus on the horizontal location of an object, usually associated with the word left. Netscape Navigator uses the left property of an element. Internet Explorer uses the pixelLeft property of the style object property. Netscape 6 uses the W3C Standard's left property of the style object property. Since Internet Explorer 5+ supports this property as well, we can use the following browser-independent code to move objects horizontally:

<FORM>
<INPUT ID="counter1" STYLE="position:relative; left:'0px'" TYPE="button" VALUE="Move Button" 
onclick="document.getElementById('counter1').style.left = '500px';">
</FORM>

That renders like this:

Click the button and see it moving to the right 500 pixels. Notice that the measurement (500) is specified with its units of measure (pixels). If you try to drop the px, you will get the same behavior. Here is the HTML above without px:

<FORM>
<INPUT ID="counter2" STYLE="position:relative; left:0" TYPE="button" VALUE="Move Button" 
onclick="document.getElementById('counter2').style.left = 500;">
</FORM>

And you can play with it as well: