The Javascript prompt is a relic from the 1990's that you seldom see being used in modern day
websites. The point of the Javascript prompt is to gather information from the user so that it can
be used throughout the site to "personalize" it for the visitor.
Back in the day you'd often
see these prompts on personal web pages asking for your name. After you typed in the information you would be greeted with a page that had a welcome message,
such as "Welcome to My Personal Web Page John Schmieger!" (If you name just happened to be John Schmieger).
The Javascript prompt is not very useful and many find it slightly annoying, but hey, this tutorial
is here to educate you, so let's learn how to make that prompt!
Simple Javascript Prompt
You can use a prompt for a wide variety of useless tasks, but below we use it for an exceptionally
silly task. Our prompt is used to gather the user's name to be displayed in our alert
dialogue box.
HTML & Javascript Code:
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function prompter() {
var reply = prompt("Hey there, good looking stranger! What's your name?", "")
alert (reply)
}
//-->
</script>
</head>
<body>
<input type="button" onclick="prompter()" value="Say my name!">
</body>
Display:
Recap on Javascript Prompt
It sure is a quick way to gather some information, but it is not as a
reliable information gatherer as the other options available to you. If you want
to find out someone's name and information, the best way to request this information would
be to use HTML Forms. And if you wanted
to use the information throughout the website, you might use some
PHP to get that job done in a more sophisticated manner.