Category: Development
Jan 112008
[N]ext time you wonder why your toolkit of choice is built the way it is or why it’s even necessary, just remember that in many cases they are protecting you from a decade or more of bad decision making.
Jan 32008
I’ve been working hard on RKelly lately. RKelly is a Ruby implementation of Kelly. Kelly is a fictional project that I made up so that I could name my project RKelly.
Dec 292007
Justin looks at what YUI gets right in fostering third-party scripts. In particular he enjoys the inline documentation, which gets converted to an API reference using JsDoc Toolkit. I’ve long been interested in inline docs, but have not found a system that would not require more effort than writing the docs separately as we do now. (Relatedly: Prototype UI seems to be using Natural Docs.)
Dec 112007
Unfortunately, to start this incremental rendering, Safari requires a kilobyte of data at the beginning of the stream. In Orbited, we use 100
<span></span>tags for this. But at some point we’ll perhaps switch this to some tasteful ASCII art.
Dec 72007
Rails 2.0 released. Includes the 1.6.0.1 release of Prototype (which will see an official release very soon).
Nov 242007
Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn’t). Exactly! I tire of JS framework wars for the same reason I tire of language wars: you should use whatever makes you happy. You’re not trying to get your framework of choice to “win”; there’s nothing to be won. Evangelism is a good thing; you ought to share your happiness with others. Zealotry is not.
Nov 72007
Chris wants: stability, interoperability, security, and functionality, in that order. Yet after repeated requests to provide specific, detailed, technical reasons why ES4 doesn’t address all four of those priorities (which it does, IMHO), no answer. I have yet to see a single detailed explanation of how ES4 would “break the web.” Not from Chris, Doug, or anyone else at Microsoft. Would love to see such discussion, truly. Send me links if you know of any.
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
Aug 72007
The new version of iPhoto, announced not too long ago, features Web Gallery, a way to export your photo library to a .Mac web share. The sample gallery confirms that these Ajax-heavy galleries use Prototype and Scriptaculous under the hood. It could not make me happier that Apple seem to have adopted the two libraries company-wide.
Jul 82007
In case you’re not tired of iPhone musings: as I was playing with the two-finger zooming in Safari, I remembered Dave Hyatt’s April 2006 blog post on high-DPI web sites. Eerily prescient in hindsight, he argues that web developers should make sure their images can scale — in anticipation of high-res displays (like, say, 160 dpi) and browsers that let the user zoom in (like, say, Safari). The timing of the post makes me wonder just what Hyatt knew and when he knew it.
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