Question

By oddities, I mean these two things:

1. Functions in the first parameter need to be surrounded by
   quotations, or else the delay is set to 0 (Everything is executed
   instantly).
2. Everything after the timeout needs to have a delay after it as
   well, or else it is executed prior to the timeout finishing.

If there’s a way around #2 – that would be awesome, but right now I’m just curious on this.

Short snippet to explain what I’m talking about:

for (var i=0; i<10; i++) setTimeout("addInput('.')",i*500);
setTimeout('addInput("</br>")',5100);

In the above, unless addInput(‘.’) is surrounded by quotations, the delay is ignored and the code is just executed; also unless I add a timeout to the second line, it will be executed before the first timeout is finished.

Answer 1

Functions in the first parameter need to be surrounded by quotations,
or else the delay is set to 0 (Everything is executed instantly).

Not necessarily. In fact it is recommended to use the overload which takes directly a function pointer instead of a string to avoid the overhead of parsing it:

for (var i=0; i<10; i++) {
    setTimeout(function() {
        addInput('.');
    }, i * 500);
}

or its equivalent (warning: doesn’t work in IE):

for (var i=0; i<10; i++) {
    setTimeout(addInput, i * 500, '.');
}

The following setTimeout overload is the one that is most commonly used:

var timeoutID = window.setTimeout(func, delay, [param1, param2, ...]);