Friday, 19th June 2009
Unimpressed by NodeIterator. John Resig, one of the most talented API designers I’ve ever come across, posts some well earned criticism of the document.createNodeIterator DOM traversal API.
Towards a Standard for Django Session Messages. I completely agree that Django’s user.message_set (which I helped design) is unfit for purpose, but I don’t think sessions are the right solution for messages sent to users. A signed cookie containing either the full message or a key referencing the message body on the server is a much more generally useful solution as it avoids the need for a round trip to a persistent store entirely.
The breakneck race to build an application to crowdsource MPs’ expenses. Charles Arthur wrote up a very nice piece on the development effort behind the Guardian’s crowdsourcing expenses app.