Simon Willison’s Weblog

Namespaces. Python’s approach to imports is possibly my favourite feature of the language. I love being able to scan up to the top of a file in my text editor and see exactly where every symbol comes from, no IDE required.

# 2nd December 2009, 9:31 am / namespaces, python, import, ide, christopher-lenz

XHTML—myths and reality. Useful overview of XHTML from Tina Holmboe of the W3C’s XHTML Working Group, which suggests considering HTML 4.01 strict unless you need mixed namespaces for things like MathML. I’ve been storing this blog’s content as XHTML but serving as HTML for several years now.

# 7th October 2008, 4:56 pm / mathml, xhtml, tinaholmboe, w3c, namespaces, html

getElementsByClassName pre Prototype 1.6. Older releases of Prototype break in Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1 due to unsafe namespace management—getElementsByClassName is now a browser built-in but with different semantics to the Prototype method of the same name. Prototype 1.6 is fine.

# 26th March 2008, 8:28 am / getelementsbyclassname, javascript, john-resig, firefox3, namespaces, prototype, safari

Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit. The new built-in development tools look similar enough to Firebug to make me very happy. Also of interest: Selectors API (for fast getElementsBySelector), CSS 2.1 support, support for XHTML style namespaces in HTML, an interesting Web Slices feature based on the hAtom microformat and 6 connections per host (up from 2) which should make Comet easier.

# 5th March 2008, 6:28 pm / comet, javascript, css, standards, ie8, selectors, namespaces, hatom, microformats