Labels.js
10th September 2002
Spotted on youngpup: Labels.js: A Re-Introduction to DHTML (from December 2001).
Although simple, Labels.js is an example of my ideal DHTML script, and an example of what I believe the W3C had in mind for the DOM. Some of the design goals that it meets are:
- Completely modular design. Labels.js uses event listeners exclusively to avoid interference with any other scripts or functionality. It does not require any special “initialization”, and it does not modify it’s environment.
- Unitializes itself before page unload so that a label will never be submitted as the value of a form field to a server process. This is consistent with the idea of complete modularity.
- Built on the DOM. Instead of using it’s own complex custom object heirarchies, Labels.js is essentially glue code stringing together the existing functionality in the DOM.
- Does not require any extra presentational or behavioral information beyond what is present in the underlying XHTML.
- Degrades beautifully to it’s structural components: a label and a textbox.
The same elegant approach to DHTML can be seen in Stuart’s aqTree javascript tree system.
More recent articles
- llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer - 29th November 2023
- Prompt injection explained, November 2023 edition - 27th November 2023
- I'm on the Newsroom Robots podcast, with thoughts on the OpenAI board - 25th November 2023
- Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos - 22nd November 2023
- Deciphering clues in a news article to understand how it was reported - 22nd November 2023
- Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat? - 15th November 2023
- Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe - 10th November 2023
- ospeak: a CLI tool for speaking text in the terminal via OpenAI - 7th November 2023
- DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema - 30th October 2023
- Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 - 26th October 2023