Erik A. Hanson's Weblog

I often want to add a bunch of styles to an element, so I wrote a stylize method so I can do something like this:

$("foo").stylize({
  color: red,
  background-color: green,
  text-decoration: underline
});

Implementing stylize is easy with Prototype‘s Element.addMethods() method:

var ElementExtensions = {
  stylize: function(element, styles) {
    for (var s in styles) {
      element.style[s] = styles[s];
    }
    return element;
  }
}
Element.addMethods(ElementExtensions);

Update: Prototype 1.6 added a similar setStyle method which works similarly but also allows CSS string-type style declaration (e.g., myElement.setStyle("color: blue; border: 3px")). Still, the above is a nice example of Element.addMethods().