Category: Articles

Practical Prototype & script.aculo.us: the book

Against all odds, I have written a book designed to familiarize the reader with Prototype and script.aculo.us.
How am I supposed to convey how hard this was? I’d say it was like giving childbirth, but the process itself took much longer than it takes to grow a baby.
Why did it take so long? First: unlike a […]

Stop making “lazy list” posts or I’ll kill you (with Greasemonkey script)

I really was going to let this slide. But something pushed me over the edge today.
I’m not the first to complain about this; Matt Haughey said it a year ago. But since then things have only gotten worse.
Blogging is a trade far more respectable than its silly name would suggest, folks. I understand that traffic […]

Prototype 1.6 & Opera

Prototype 1.6.0.2 was released last week. It’s a bugfix and performance release, naturally, but for the first time Prototype boasts official support for Opera 9.25 and higher.
For a while we’ve supported Opera on a casual basis — we’d try to fix bugs reported against Opera, but we’d let small test failures slide. Call it C-grade browser […]

Standards & Complications

Acid2 was the good news. This is the bad news. I don’t mind so much, really, because it’s the least painful solution to a problem that needed to be solved.

Pseudo-custom events in Prototype 1.6

I’m calling these pseudo-custom events because they serve the same purpose as standard browser events: they report on certain occurrences in the UI. Here we’re using custom events to act as uniform façades to inconsistently-implemented events. Together we’ll write some code to generate mouse:wheel events. At the end of this article, you’ll know enough to be able to write code to generate mouse:enter and mouse:leave events document-wide. 1

English: The Perl of Natural Languages

The American Heritage Dictionary, in a usage note below the definition of the word shall, uses more words than I’ve ever used to describe anything. I’m reprinting them here because I find this fascinating, in an odd mystery-solving sort of way. I’m a linguistic Jessica Fletcher.
The traditional rules for using shall and will prescribe a […]

Capabilities vs. Quirks: a look at browser sniffing

Two recent articles argue for an approach to writing JavaScript that relies on the individual capabilities and quirks of a browser, rather than one that relies on sniffing as a first option. This is a noble idea and one we’ve started to integrate into Prototype over the last six months. But, like everything else involving DOM scripting, it’s complicated.

Screens from Gamefly

Gamefly, the Netflix of video games, does a nice thing when you try to rent your first game on a new system:

Much better than being forced to go to an options page.
However, the “GameQ” page — where you can specify the order in which you want your games delivered — needs a little work:

If ever […]

With Ajax Having Been Experienced…

That’s right — I just used the perfect passive participle. Deal with it.
Everyone else is doing it, so I suppose I have to do a postmortem on The Ajax Experience.
IE.next and JavaScript
The just-released Internet Explorer 7 features only a few crumbs for JavaScript developers, so I respect Chris Wilson and the rest of the […]

More than you ever wanted to know about $$ and XPath

I took great interest in Sylvain Zimmer’s optimized version of Prototype’s $$ function, since I’ve been working on something very similar recently. Sylvain’s version uses more workmanlike string parsing; mine uses XPath. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses.