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Left for dead by many, HTML resurfaced half a year ago when the w3 released a working draft for the next version of this markup language. The draft was recently updated and a document detailing the differences from the previous version was released as well.
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Archive for the ‘Javascript’ Category
HTML 5 shaping up nicely
Friday, June 20th, 2008jQuery and Prototype the choice of top websites
Saturday, June 14th, 2008Pingdom has complied a list of the Javascript frameworks used by the top sites on the web (top 100 in Alexa US, Webware's top 100 web apps). jQuery and Prototype are the top choices, getting 11 and 13 respectively.
It's interesting to note that Dojo is not even featured on this list, though if you check the comments you'll see that it is used partially at the apple site (in the apple store). This makes me wonder even more regarding Zend's latest decision to integrate Dojo into their framework. As I commented in that release statement (comment #6 is mine), I feel that Dojo isn't appropriate as the default for the framework as it is more complex and much less documented than the other top frameworks.
As a long time jQuery developer I have no intentions of integrating a new Javascript library into my development environment, so I'm obviously biased. I still feel as though Zend missed an opportunity here to better cater to the needs of a broader user base and instead chose to prioritize its partners best interests.
Semi-colon mystery explained, jQuery UI released
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008Javascript is a very mysterious language. Its prototypical inheritance structure and its function == object == function concepts are quite different compared to standard OO languages. As I did with PHP, I try my best to learn best good practices by studying frameworks I like, and in Javascript's case that would be jQuery.
I had believed I figured out most of the conventions used in the jQuery source code, however a recent addition has been bugging me and I could not find a reasonable explanation for it - I'm talking about the mysterious semi-colons appearing at the beginning of some of the source files in the library. What is its purpose? Does it make the closure invisible to giant robots from outer space? I had no leads to go on.
This blog post by the jQuery.rule team however, reveals the truth about the semi-colon debacle - apparently they're used for safe file concatenation (string join). Well that's a load off my chest. You learn something new every day.
In related news, jQuery UI 1.5 has been officially released, says the jQuery enquirer. jQuery 1.5 is an extensive UI oriented extension to jQuery, and version 1.5 bring forth many improvements such as a tighter API, an effects library called enchant, a skinning mechanism and plenty of bug fixes. I'm just excited they finally updated their documentation, as I've been using it for a while going only by source code.
Almost useful IE replacement
Sunday, June 8th, 2008I stumbled upon a tool by the name of IETester today, that is supposed to render websites in different IE engines from version 5.5 to 8 beta. It appears to be working quite well, allowing to open multiple tabs of different IE versions. Unfortunately its Javascript support is too limited to be of real use for serious application development.
Still, a nice tool for web designers wishing to test their HTML and CSS layouts against several generations of IE, without having to resort to hacking multiple installations of different versions (such as multipleIE).
IETester [via LifeHacker]
jQuery development marches on (1.2.6)
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008jQuery 1.2.6 was released recently, with plenty of bug-fixes and speed improvements. Most notably event handling was sped up 103% and the dimensions plugin was integrated into the framework (the dimensions plugin is an API to calculate elements sizes in a cross-browser and reliable way).
In addition, jQuery UI has recently reached release-candidate status, which means all non minor or trivial issues were solved and it's getting to the point that it will production ready shortly. I have been using its components for a while in anticipation of such release, and hopefully they will have their documentation up soon.
Good times to be jQuery developers 