Yesterday I had to opportunity to present at Drupalcon Boston 2008. It was a great experience to be able to mingle with the Drupal folks, hear their concerns, and see what kind of challenges they’re facing in everyday development. Overwhelmingly Drupal users are not of the JavaScript persuasion and jQuery was a breath of fresh […]
Comment · Posted: March 7th, 2008
Our day has finally come. CSS coders got some love with Internet Explorer 7 – us JavaScript folk got absolutely nothing. In fact, at last count, all we got were a couple new bugs to deal with (file:// requests not working via XMLHttpRequest and <object>.getElementsByTagName(“*”) always returning no elements). Internet Explorer 8 is our release. […]
Comment · Posted: March 6th, 2008
I’m really excited about Microsoft’s switch today to make standards mode rendering the default rendering style, going forward – even at the cost of “breaking the web.” I think this is going to have serious positive ramifications for the whole web ecosystem, which is just fantastic. I can’t imagine this decision coming lightly and I […]
Comment · Posted: March 4th, 2008
A common technique for writing cross-browser JavaScript code is to detect the features that you wish to use before you actually use them. Good object detection is done on a case-by-case basis, analyzing each feature as it’s encountered. Some common examples of object detection: All that these are doing is detecting if these particular properties […]
Comment · Posted: February 29th, 2008
Something that’s frequently befuddled is the differentiation between where JavaScript is executing and where performance hits are taking place. The difficulty is related to the fact that many aspects of a browser engine are reliant upon many others causing their performance issues to be constantly intertwined. To attempt to explain this particular inter-relationship I’ve created […]
Comment · Posted: February 28th, 2008
The development of ECMAScript 4 is moving into an important phase: the implementors are making good on their word and are starting to implement the ECMAScript 4 proposals. Many of the features have been well thought out by this point and the implementors are working hard to integrate the necessary changes into their engines. A […]
Comment · Posted: February 27th, 2008
Tonight was the second meetup of the Boston JavaScript group and it was a huge success. 18 people attended, in all, and there was a lot of discussion about all forms of JavaScript. There were, at least, 3 people who actively use JavaScript on the server-side including Jason Wadsworth the creator of Crosscheck. We got […]
Comment · Posted: February 26th, 2008
I’ve alluded to it a couple times now but it’s probably important to state it definitively: I’m writing a new JavaScript book, to be published by Manning Publishing, called Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. I published the rough Table of Contents previously and the contents of the book will be staying virtually the same (with […]
Comment · Posted: February 25th, 2008
