How do I move the printed text to the top?

What are some nice, clean ways to move around and/or manipulate text (not images of text) on a webpage without Flash or something heavy like that?

• I have some programming background (C++ primarily), but I don't know much about jQuery or similar magic.  I can learn new approaches quickly, and I'm trying to understand what would be a good next thing to study.  I would like to be able to move the text on a webpage around, eliminate it, generate new text, change details (at least at the character level) of existing text, etc.  Should I just dig my teeth into some JavaScript goodness and take it from there, are there specific aspects of JavaScript that I should focus on, or are there other options that I'm overlooking?

• Answer:

  If you just want to manipulate text, you definitely don't need Flash. With today's modern JavaScript implementations, manipulating text is quite clean. The main idea is to just get a reference to some HTML element and change its CSS attributes dynamically in your code. So basically, just think about how you would statically position everything you want with CSS. Then write some JavaScript to change the CSS attributes as needed to create animation or other effects. A great tool for learning JavaScript is the built-in Developer Tools feature of Google Chrome. It is a rather full-featured JavaScript debugging IDE, and lets you manipulate the page you're viewing by changing its HTML and CSS, and running arbitrary JavaScript code. I suggest searching for JavaScript tutorials and references and then playing around with ideas in Chrome Developer Tools. You can also visit some sites that you like and use Developer Tools to spy on what they're doing under the hood.