After relaunching my personal site and realizing all my other sites are in pretty good shape for the first time in forever, I’ve suddenly found myself with plenty of free “tech time” to mess around with whatever I want to mess around with. Which is cool, because, while I appreciate being able to tinker in a very practical manner on production sites and learning from what what works now, I really miss being able to mess around with the newness out there. Sometimes, like with the HTML5 work I’ve been doing, the two can meet, but more often than not the brand new stuff needs to sit on the burner a little bit before it’s ready for prime time.
You’ll see where all of this is going when you see the first topic in this month’s recent reading roundup. Read the rest of this entry »
Rob Larsen will lead an interactive session outlining the basic steps to getting started with using JavaScript using modern techniques. For the beginner it will serve as a road map to using JavaScript with confidence. For the more advanced user it will serve and a forum to discuss fundamental best practices as Rob will be soliciting feedback and discussion throughout.
It’ll be basically a step by step on getting JavaScript onto a page, in a modern, “best practices” way. Starting with attaching the script to the page using the script tag all the way through writing a function and attaching it to an element. Each step will be split into three levels of discussion:
For the beginners each will simply be presented as “this is how you do it”
For the intermediate user it will be “this is why we do it this way”
For the advanced user it will be a question- “where does this fall apart and how can we make it better”
Don’t ask why I’m poking around the wayback machine (that would spoil the surprise,) but if you’ve been around as long as I have and want to reminisce, or never got to experience Web 1.0 as a developer and want to see what all the complaints are about, you should really take a look at Netscape’s JavaScript documentation from 1999.
Here’s one that will confuse the hell out of anyone who started doing this after maybe 2003: Read the rest of this entry »
Conditional Compilation is a handy, Internet Explorer specific method for forking bits of JavaScript. The nice thing about it is that real browsers don’t notice it at all. It just looks like a comment block to any non-IE browser. Which saves the rest of the world from even having to if (IE) { } else { } . I like that.
Anyway, we use it to fix some of IE’s shortcomings. One standard pattern is using it to fake the :hover pseudo-class on inputs in IE6. Something like this:
//IE6 HOVERS simplified//
//this would be a bit different in protection
//but you can see the idea
/*@cc_on @*/
/*@if (@_win32)
var inputElements = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
var test = inputElements.length;
for (var i=0; i<test; i++) {
if (inputElements[i].getAttribute("type") == "submit"){
inputElements[i].onmouseover = inputElements[i].onfocus = function(){
addClass(this, "hover");
}
inputElements[i].onmouseout = inputElements[i].onblur = function(){
removeClass(this, "hover");
}
};
};
/*@end @*/
//END IE6 HOVERS//
I saw this tweet yesterday and was reminded , once again, of how misunderstood the return value of a DOM method like document.getElementsByTagName is. Normally, it doesn’t matter that folks don’t really understand the return value fully, because most of the time the code just works. Where it breaks is interesting, so it’s worth taking a look at it in a little bit of depth.
Typically people do things like this:
var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
for (var i = 0; i < anchors.length; i++) {
anchors[i].addEventListener("click", beAwesome, false)
}
Common pattern. Get a list of the anchors on the page, loop through and add an event to each.
If asked, I’d be willing to bet most people would assume that the list they’re interacting with is an Array. It’s got a length and you can index it- that’s got to be an Array, right?
No, there are no HTML or CSS books. I haven’t felt the need to dive into those subjects, in depth, since 1999. Based on the foundation I got from studying specs and experimenting in 1998-2000, I can read the occasional A List Apart article, look at Quirksmode and keep up to date.
I should add, I’m reading Dive Into HTML5 as it’s released. That’s what the first change in the specs in 10 years will do to a fellow.
Read and build. Build and read. That’s my fall, I hope. With the new changes to their app distribution program, I’ve decided I’m going to do something open source.
I’ve been really itching to get started on something with WebOS. In general I’m dying to do something complicated with JavaScript and the announcement of the Pixi and the Nokia rumors have kept WebOs on my mind, so this news really got my attention:
Things are afoot. I’m building out the redesign of Drunkenfist.com, and we’re working on an internal redesign at work. I’ve been toying with the idea of using the new HTML5 semantic elements for both and to that end I took some time to evaluate Modernizr, the small JS library that programatically exposes HTML5/CSS3 feature support (via classes on the HTML element) and “fixes” IE’s style support for some of the newer semantic elements. Read the rest of this entry »
