HTML CSS JavaScript

Thanks to Jason Duclos, my presentation from a couple of weeks ago is live. In it I compare standard JavaScript DOM methods to YUI, jQuery, Dojo and Prototype/Scriptaculous.

JavaScript Library Showdown from rob larsen on Vimeo.

Here's the deck.

Jason is the man for putting this together, by the way.

I use Dreamweaver. I have since version 1.0.

I'm a fan.

That said, as you would imagine, I very rarely use the WYSIWYG features. I mostly use the text editor and the site management features (including Subweaver, a handy SVN inetgration.) Occasionally, however, I do open it in WYSIWG mode and very often I'm surprised at how well that editor actually handles things.

Last night I ran into one such surprise.
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We launched a new version of Cramer's web site last week and I'm pretty happy with it. Read the rest of this entry »

This being a technology blog, with plenty of code samples being posted on a regular basis, it's no surprise I give soem thought as to how that code is displayed. Personally I've gone for the old school, green on black text (using the excellent code font Consolas, where possible.) I like the way it looks.

function heckYeah() {
    check.it.out();
}

The one problem is with really long lines. Since I use a lot of real world examples and it's code I'm caught between a desire to have one line of code=one line on the screen (easier to scan) and the readability issues that a scrolling text box creates.
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Announcing webOSdev

I’m very pleased to announce that effective today we are wrapping up the webOS early access program. We are doing this because today we opened up the program to everyone and released our new public developer portal at http://developer.palm.com. This is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people here at Palm, and I want to be the first to thank them for making this happen.

This is one more step in delivering webOS to all developers and providing the tools they need to build great applications for Palm phones.

Please go register and join us on the new server. For a change this significant, I’m sure there are going to be some rough edges and broken links. If you run into one, please let us know by posting on the new forums. If you have trouble registering or can’t access the forums for some reason then please email me at pdn@palm.com and I’ll work with you to resolve it.

Head on over to the Developer portal to download it. I'll be hacking away at every spare moment, and will be posting my findings here. Fun times.

Running:

My presentation went well, I think. It started a little later than I would have liked, and I didn't have any water (insane? yes.) but overall it was a lot of fun. People seemed interested, which is the important part.

The really interesting news is that the presentation was recorded, so I should be able to post a version to Youtube at some point in the future.

Thanks to the folks over at the The Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University for hosting me and working with Jason to get the camera equipment set up.

Okay, okay… I'm guilty. The title is provocative and slightly misleading. I do care about developers. Developers are my people and I want nothing but the best for them.

That said, when I'm sitting down planning a site, application or component, my first thought isn't about making things easier for developers. It's about making things easier for users. If I can do both, great. The world is just that much nearer to perfection. If not, whenever possible I'm going to err on the side the user by trying to make the site they see better/stronger/faster.

(well, maybe not stronger…)

That's why I cringe when people enthuse about how easy something was to implement.

"That was great. I just had to write two lines of JavaScript and I've this cool Ajax component."

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Yesterday I was wondering why obj.getElementsByTagName wasn't working in Safari/WebKit on a tag with a namespace prefix. I wondered, aloud, whether or not it was just something I was ignorant of.

It turns out that was the case. Dom Level 2 added new namespace specific methods to search through documents or document fragments for tags of a specific NameSpace. I'd just never had to use them before. Learning that greatly simplified the hacky code I wrote yesterday. Here it is, new and improved:
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Between Palm letting me code directly on a killer handheld device, HTML5 starting to show up in real browsers and now Google saying things like the following [my emphasis], it's a damn fine time to be coding on the front end:

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

This is also interesting for me personally, as I'm a big fan of my Dell Mini 9 Inspiron and I'd be tempted to dual boot it- just to double my geeky pleasure.

Is It Me or the Browser?

I had a Safari bug on a project I'm rushing to get out the door. We're using a Flickr feed to populate a div with link+thumbnail to some flickr images. In Firefox/Internet Explorer I simply did the following to build the links:

flickr : function(obj) {
//get the full list of items
	var items = obj.getElementsByTagName("item");
//make sure it's not empty
	if (items.length > 0 ) {
//start the HTML block
		var blob = "<div id='flickrFeed'>";
//loop through the items (we only want 5) and build some links)
		for (var i = 0; i< 5 ; i++) {
//get the link
			var flink = items[i].getElementsByTagName("link")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue; 
//get the thumbnail
			var flurl = items[i].getElementsByTagName("media:thumbnail")[0].getAttribute("url");
//smash them into the string
			blob+="<a href='"+flink+"'><img height='75' width='75' src='"+flurl+"' /></a>";
		};
//close the div
		blob+="</div>";
//pop it onto the shelf, for later use
		$("hyperspace").innerHTML+=blob;
	} else {
//if there's somethign wrong with the feed, go to default contentk
		social.fallBack.flickr(); 
	}
}

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