688 items tagged “javascript”
2007
MySpace: Too Much of a Good Thing? CSS customization really was just the result of forgetting to strip HTML. They “eventually” decided to filter out JavaScript(!)
jQuery 1.1. jQuery is one year old. The latest release features API improvements and some significant optimisations.
The JavaScript alert(), confirm() and prompt() functions in Firefox, Opera and MSIE (but not Safari) will truncate the message after any null character. So an unsuspecting programmer who inserts user-provided text into one of these dialog boxes opens up an opportunity for the user to rewrite the bottom of the dialog box.
AJAX Debugging with Firebug. Great Firebug tutorial from creator Joe Hewitt himself. I didn’t know you could trigger profiling from your own code using console.profile() / console.profileEnd().
Offline Gmail and Blogger Using the Dojo Offline Toolkit. These are just mockups at the moment, but they’re a useful illustration of how offline browsing modes for Web applications could work.
macrumorslive.com. The MacRumors ajax keynote coverage gets better every time—now they have live photos in addition to the text updates. Simple but effective.
IE JScript Performance Recommendations Part 3. Once again, Microsoft’s official advice is to avoid closures entirely rather than learn how to use them safely. Sigh.
The Dojo Offline Toolkit. The Dojo Offline Toolkit will be a small, cross-platform, generic download that enables web applications to work offline.
2006
Javascript character set screw-ups (via) Some browsers treat JavaScript files as having the same content-type as the page from which they are linked. This could cause problems with UTF-8 encoded JSON; the workaround is serving up ASCII with unicode escape sequences.
Why JSON isn’t just for JavaScript
Dave Winer’s discovery of JSON (and shock that “it’s not even XML”) has triggered an interesting discussion thread, on his blog and elsewhere. Plenty of people have re-assured him (and themselves) that it’s only used for JavaScript—it’s convenient in the browser but irrelevant elsewhere.
[... 787 words]Conditionally Sticky Sidebar. A nicer implementation of the trick I’m using for my add comment form; this one takes advantage of position: fixed in browsers that support it.
Create cross browser vector graphics. An accessible introduction to dojo.gfx, a powerful 2D drawing API built on SVG and VML.
YUI CSS Grid builder (via) The YUI CSS grid system can be hard to get your head around. This interactive tool makes it much easier to figure out.
Making GWT Better. Explains the philosophy behind GWT. It’s all about the tools!
GWT 1.3 Release Candidate is 100% Open Source. At least you can see how the code generator works now.
Java SE 6 Released. “Script engines” (like JavaScript, Jython and JRuby) become a first class citizen.
WYMeditor. A semantic rich text editor that appears not to suck!
Including Dojo, The Really Easy Way. Drop in a single include to load code on demand from AOL’s CDN.
Introducing the Technorati Link Count Widget. I’m trying this out; it’s pretty sweet. Nicely unobtrusive too.
Tamarin
On Tuesday, the Mozilla Foundation and Adobe announced the Tamarin project, an open-source ECMAScript virtual machine based on the ActionScript engine used by Flash Player 9.
[... 380 words]Dojo 0.4 release notes (via) GFX (a 2D drawing API) is awesome; dojo.html.metrics looks extremely useful, and onDomLoad is always nice.
Browser JavaScript in Opera. Opera monkeypatches some sites, and auto-updates the patches once a week.
XMLHttpRequests using an IFrame Proxy (via) Another scary hack abstracted away by Dojo.
Notes on JavaScript Libraries
@media 2006 was a blast. Great talks, great people and some of the highest production values I’ve ever seen at a conference (check out the bags!).
[... 682 words]Fjax: Just say no
To my utter amazement, a decent amount of buzz appears to be building around a new “technology” called Fjax—much of it centred around this interview on Webmonkey, but also benefiting from a mention on the O’Reilly Radar and of course the obligatory Digg story.
[... 879 words]Brad Neuberg introduces dojo.storage. Incredibly technically impressive, embodying months of accumulated expertise.
Speaking gigs
I’ve been doing a fair amount of public speaking recently, based on the principle that the only way to get good at it is to get a lot of practise. My last two talks were a session on Django and Web Application Frameworks at the ACCU 2006 conference and a talk on the Yahoo! Developer Network for NMK’s Beers and Innovation series.
[... 304 words]An S3 AJAX Wiki. Les continues to innovate against S3.
JavaScript apps with read/write access to S3. JS apps hosted on S3 could read and write to the store.
Learning Flash for programmers?
I’ve decided it’s about time I learnt some Flash, mainly because of the exciting opportunities posed by the Flash-JavaScript bridge. It’s become pretty obvious now that Flash is the most practical option for dealing with audio and video on the Web, and the bridge means that anything Flash can do is now available to JavaScript as well. Google Finance and the Yahoo! JS-Flash Maps API are just two recent examples of why this stuff is worth knowing more about.
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