I am displaying some simple styled text as html in a UIWebView on iPhone. It is basically a series of paragraphs with the occasional strong or emphasized phrase. At runtime I need to apply styles to ranges of text.
There are a few similar scenarios, one of which is highlighting search results. If the user has searched for "something" I would like to change the background color behind occurrences of the word, then later restore the original background.
Is it possible to apply styles to ranges of text using javascript? A key part of this is also being able to unset the styles.
There seem to be two likely paths to follow. One would be modifying some html in Objective-C and passing it through javascript as the new innerHTML of some container. The other would be to use javascript to directly manipulate DOM nodes.
I could manipulate html, but that sounds tedious in Objective-C so I would rather manipulate the DOM if that is a reasonable approach. I am not that familiar with javascript and DOM so I do not know if it is a reasonable approach.
I wrote some routines to translate between text ranges and node ranges with offsets. So if I start with text range 100-200 and that starts in one paragraph and ends in a third, I can get the text nodes and the offsets within the nodes that represent the given text range. I just need a way to split a text node at an offset in the text. Currently I just apply styles to the paragraphs containing the text range.
A few notes:
straight javascript please, no external frameworks like jquery.
the changes never need to be written to disk.
the changes should be undoable or at least removable.
the styles to apply already exist in a css file.
it needs to work in iPhone 3.0 and forward.
all the source files are shipped with the app.
please be verbose.
Thanks for any suggestions.
