[IPOL discuss] slider inputs for IPOL demos

[Pascal Getreuer]

This is a follow-up on my implementation of sliders for IPOL demos.
Nicolas suggested the JQueryUI library.

> Do you think a JS library is too much for our needs? What about the
> slider in jQueryUI, a major player in this field?
> -> http://docs.jquery.com/UI/Slider
> -> http://jqueryui.com/demos/slider/

The JQueryUI library is nice: it possible to have a fully-featured
slider with straightforward code.  JQuery is highly-regarded and has a
lot of attention, so that means (I hope) JQueryUI has good browser
support and receives continuing maintenance.  Also, JQuery and
JQueryUI are nonrestrictively licensed [1].

Please try the demo on my webpage
   http://www.math.ucla.edu/~getreuer/jqslider.html

For comparison, here is my previous slider implementation
   http://www.math.ucla.edu/~getreuer/slider.html

The advantage of the JQueryUI version is that the slider has more
features (like keyboard support), a well-developed JavaScript
interface that facilitates more readable code, and the library is
maintained by the web experts.  I much prefer the JQueryUI version
over my previous implementation.

If there is anything to complain about, the JQuery+JQueryUI libraries
are rather hefty (82 KB), which is enough to affect page load speed
[2].  My previous and very minimal implementation is much smaller (4
KB).  Then again, we are probably also loading ~100 KB in images on
the demo page anyway, so it seems this point doesn't matter so much
here.

[1] http://jquery.org/license
[2] http://ejohn.org/blog/library-loading-speed/


Pascal Getreuer