My New IBM Article is Live: “HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies”

Posted on by Rob Larsen

In it, I make a small argument for using HTML5 as a generic marketing term. I’ll be following up on that a little later, here on this blog.

Anyway, check it out. The resources section is worth it alone.

HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies.

Web standard development and marketing

It’s a great time to be a web developer. After a long period of hibernation, the standards bodies and browser vendors have been extremely busy over the past few years, generating a torrent of exciting technology. Developers are greedily seizing on this work, producing demos and full-blown applications at a steady pace. Fed by this activity and further boosted by the growth of their standards-capable mobile browsers, companies like Google and Apple are using these new standards to market their products and services. The wider press is also seizing on this wave and pushing standards hype well beyond the normal circle of web developers and browser vendors.

This volume of discussion has obvious benefits, of course. People getting excited about web standards is a positive development for everyone in the industry. From that perspective, the persistent use of blanket terms, especially HTML5, as a sort of brand shorthand for “emerging web technology” is a useful shortcut. It allows nontechnical people to grasp—in a generalized way—the exciting work being done in the standards space right now.

Interestingly, even the W3C has gotten into the act, using HTML5 and its associated logo (see Figure 1) to publicize the “web platform.”

Read the rest…

My Latest developerWorks Article is Live: ECMA-262, 5th Edition

Posted on by Rob Larsen

ECMA-262, 5th Edition.

The standard published under the dry title ECMA-262, 5th Edition hereafter referred to as ES5, is the latest version of the ECMAScript specification. ECMAScript is the standard upon which JavaScript—the single most important language on the web today—is built. Because the language also serves as the basis for Adobe ActionScript in addition to other flavors, it’s fair to say that the ECMAScript standard is central to the present and future of interactivity on the web.

Published in December 2009, ES5 represents an incremental improvement in the language, arrived at through a lengthy, and occasionally contentious, process. Still, whatever friction there might have been in the development of the specification, the end result contains some excellent enhancements to the language. This article outlines the long history of the specification’s development, then steps through many of its important new features and concepts.

Hiring Front End Engineers: How I Look at a Candidate’s Past Work

Posted on by Rob Larsen

The short answer is- I don’t pay all that much attention to the sites listed on a candidate’s resume.

Don’t get me wrong, I look at sites and I prefer to see at least three or four examples when doing an evaluation. It’s just that I’m looking at sites mostly to exclude people. We see a lot of unqualified candidates at the resume level, so most of what we need to do at this point is to get rid of all the people who have no chance. Because of that, I’m visiting listed sites just to make sure the work looks professional and is done in a reasonably modern style. Basically I don’t want to see any tables, inline event handlers, or generated code and looking just a little deeper I want to make sure the JavaScript doesn’t look obviously insane. If they pass that test, then the real work of the hiring process begins. We’ll start the rest of the interview process in order to dig deeper into their front end knowledge and personality.

Why I Don’t Look at Source Code

I could view source and maybe learn a thing or two, but I’ve done this long enough to know how unreliable that can be for judging a candidate’s technical ability.

The problem with looking at sites to gauge talent is actually pretty straightforward:
Continue reading “Hiring Front End Engineers: How I Look at a Candidate’s Past Work” →

Check Out My IBM DeveloperWorks Article on Sandboxed Natives, Fusebox, and FuseJS

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Summary: The concept of sandboxed natives, which are native JavaScript objects safely enhanced outside of the global namespace, has been circulating for several years. With Fusebox, we have a new, elegant approach to sandboxed natives—one that serves as the foundation for a new library, FuseJS.

Read the rest:

Sandboxed natives, Fusebox, and FuseJS.