More jQuery (BlockUI plug-in)

“The page at www.yoursite.com says…”
Does that look familiar? If you use alert() or confirm() from JavaScript in your web page, some browsers display a standard, boring window with that title, and your message in it.
A few weeks ago, I introduced jQuery, a powerful tool for writing dynamic and engaging websites quickly. Today I’d like to take a brief moment of your time to introduce BlockUI, a plug-in for jQuery. Beyond the power of jQuery itself, you can accomplish much using jQuery plug-ins. Many common tasks are taken care of and abstracted into easy to use, feature-rich plug-ins – a full list can be found at http://plugins.jquery.com/.

BlockUI (http://malsup.com/jquery/block/) is a small plug-in that will allow you to change a boring prompt into a nice-looking one.
Turn this: http://cmichaelis.whsites.net/whblog/jquery-blockui/boring.html

…into this: http://cmichaelis.whsites.net/whblog/jquery-blockui/better.html

The BlockUI plug-in allows you to place the message over the whole page, or over just a particular block element (like a “div” tag). You can specify a message to display, or you can even have a complex piece of your page hidden (with style=”display: none”) and display it in this fashion.
Visit http://malsup.com/jquery/block/ to download it, and to view more examples – and bring your website’s messages up to the next level.