Alerts: Only one wanted - How to?

[jswebdev]

(bear w/ me, there's a point coming up in paragh2)
this is kinda crazy-- i've been doing html for almost 10 years-- an last night was the first that the whole javascript thing finally came to me. don't get me wrong-- i've used it tons of times, and even written stuff-- like the Hide-a-div / css display none thing that's quite popular, etc.-- but for some reason-- it never really seemed to make sense-- blah- blah-- point is, i think i might finally have my head around it.

for one thing-- i never noticed that event handlers are actually an HTML thing-- sorta. kind of like the female to javascript's male, so to speak, right? (only the gods would know why). so i've got experience, but i'm going to ask some really dull questions about javascript here (and probably in the future, depending on what kind of response i get from the crowd. so i hope the martini's are good tonight)

the INQUIRY
i only want to have one alert popup instead of every time someone passes over the anchor eventhandler (wow! it's fun to say event handler!). it is annoying enough w/out it happening over and over. is there a way to make it do only one per visit-- even if someone comes back to the page again before they finally leave the site?

the code is essentially:

Code: Select all

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function pop() {
    alert("hey you! eggburger! farts!");
}
-->
</script>

<!-- snipped -->
<a href="someanchortarget" mouseout="pop()">sometext</a>

[snow]

I don't think there's a way to do it between pages with JavaScript - that I can remember anyway... I think you'd need some kind of session.

On the same page, to make it pop up only once you could do something like...

Code: Select all

 function pop() {
  if (done!=1) {
        alert("hey you! eggburger! farts!");
    done=1;
  }
}

Just off the top of my head after I haven't used it for a while - so there are probably much better solutions out there!

[Ryan Fait]

You can use cookies to do this, but more importantly, you need to know that JavaScript and HTML are completely separate. You should never have JavaScript inside an HTML document. Use the script take to link externally.

The document.getElementById("something"); is your friend. Learn to use and love unobtrusive JavaScript.

[ukgeoff]

Originally Posted by snow

I don't think there's a way to do it between pages with JavaScript - that I can remember anyway... I think you'd need some kind of session.

On the same page, to make it pop up only once you could do something like...

Code: Select all

 function pop() {
  if (done!=1) {
        alert("hey you! eggburger! farts!");
    done=1;
  }
}

Just off the top of my head after I haven't used it for a while - so there are probably much better solutions out there!

Be aware of a problem here that often catches out people new to JavaScript and other similar languages for that matter.

The variable you are setting, 'done' only exists inside the function, so once the function finishes, so the variable 'done' no longer exists. You would need to define the variable globally.

[snow]

Sorry I didn't include the declaration - I was just psuedo coding...

thanks for the spot!