704 posts tagged “javascript”
2007
swf Image Replacement. Really neat idea: unobtrusively replace an inline image with a SWF, then apply effects like rotation, rounded corners and drop-shadowns. Shame it suffers from Flash-Of-Unstyled-Content.
Serving YUI Files from Yahoo! Servers (via) If everyone who uses YUI links to the same set of files, your users will already have the YUI code cached in their browser when they arrive on your site.
John Resig: Thoughts on OpenAjax. I hadn’t looked in to OpenAjax—from John’s analysis it seems like they need to make it easier for open-source projects to participate and do a bunch of work to modernise their core library.
parseDateString function in dateparse.js return wrong date for ’2006-12-31’. I didn’t realise that you have to initialise a JavaScript Date object in a certain order; if you don’t weird bugs can result.
Neighbourhood Fix-It. Report problems to your council across the UK. The most detailed Ordinance Survey maps anywhere online, and a superb example of progressive enhancement in action—the maps work without JavaScript, and the site even works without images!
The Zimki Plan. Zimki is a hosted JavaScript application server by Fotango. The idea is to open source it, then build a component so developers can seamlessly switch to hosting on Fotango’s server farm if they need to handle a spike in traffic.
Sumo! A Generic Microformats Parser For JavaScript. Dan Webb’s BarCamp talk on Metaprogramming JavaScript will be a must-see.
Live DOM Viewer (via) Neat tool from Hixie that provides an insight in to what browsers are actually thinking.
The window.onload problem (still). Peter Michaux offers the most comprehensive overview of this important topic to date.
Fork JavaScript. A great name for Yet Another JavaScript Library. This one tries to combine the best bits from YUI and Prototype.
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]