I am programming a Javascript game as an exercise in objects and AJAX. It involves movement of wessels around a nautical-themed grid. Although the wessels are in an array of objects, I need to manipulate their graphical representation, their sprites. At the moment I have chosen, from a DOM perspective, to use ‘img’ elements within ‘td’ elements.
From a UI continuity perspective, which method of programmatically moving the elements with Javascript would be recommended:
(a) deleting inner html of ‘from’ cell (td element) and rewriting inner html of ‘to’ cell,
(b) clone the img node (sprite), delete the original node from its parent, and append it to the ‘to’ cell, or
(c) using positioning relative to the table element for the sprite, ignoring the td’s alltogether (although their background [color] represents the ocean depth).
I am programming a Javascript game as an exercise in objects and AJAX. It
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I would definitely stick with moving the sprite from cell to cell rather than using relative positioning to the table. My reasoning is that the table cell size might vary from browser to browser (given variances in the way padding, margins etc. are rendered – especially with annoying IE) and calculating the exact location to position the sprite in order for it to line up within a given cell might get complicated.
That narrows it down to (a) or (b) for your options. Here let’s eliminate option (a), as deleting the HTML from inside is not a clean way of manipulating the DOM. I like the idea of storing the node in an object, and then appending it to the ‘to’ cell, and then deleting the original node, which your option (b) suggests. This way, you are still dealing with the high-level ‘objects’ and not the low-level ‘text’ needlessly. You don’t need to mess with the text – for such an application, that would be the dirty ‘hackish’ way of doing it if you didn’t know about the DOM manipulation functions JavaScript already offers.
My answer is (b). However, if you absolutely require speed – though for your game I don’t know if you’ll really need the extra boost – you may consider option (a). A few sources, such as http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/innerhtml.html contend that the DOM manipulation methods are generally slower than using innerHTML. But that’s the general rule with everything. The lower the level you go, the faster you can make your code. The higher the level, the easier to understand and conceptualize the code is, and in my opinion, since speed will not make a huge difference in this case, keep it neat and go with (b).