Painfully Obvious

This is the show I’d hoped 24 would be — a high-concept, smart, solve-the-mystery serial with an ass-kicking protagonist. This is the show that pre-empted Lost one winter and never got a fair shake. It lasted only 13 episodes, but that’s the perfect length for a story like this. I love this show dearly.

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 equals money. I don’t mind that you’re using a gimmick to get people to click on your link. I mind that you’ve been using the same gimmick for a year and a half. Find something different! Hell, fall back on the old “CLICK HERE FOR GIRLS MAKING OUT” ruse! You’ve only begun to explore ways to manipulate your readers!

“Protest programming,” as a form of agitprop, is at least a generation old. Its earliest recorded practitioner was the anonymous soul who uploaded a simple GW-BASIC program to a BBS in 1986:

10 PRINT "REAGAN SUCKS"
20 GOTO 10

Profound commentary for its time.

My contribution to the art form is a Greasemonkey script that will “redact,” CIA-style, those posts that are deemed to use the “list format” crutch. It does this by checking for a numeral at the beginning of the link. It also jumps through a few hoops to catch edge cases like a preceding article (“The 9 Best Ways to Blog Your Meals”), spelled-out words (“Thirteen Productivity Habits of Insomniacs (Tip 1: Sleep Less)”), and preceding blog titles (“WorkflowSynergies » Blog Archive » 4 Ways to Synergize Your Workflows”).

To illustrate, here’s a before/after screenshot of del.icio.us’s popular links tagged with “lists.” (Fish in a barrel, I know. But I needed something to test against.)

Download it. Observe how much it obscures del.icio.us/popular, your network’s links, or even your own links. Gaze into your own souls, Internet users. Like what you see?

Here’s the script. Should also work with Safari 3 and GreaseKit.

“Secrets of JavaScript Libraries” audience

Thanks to the SXSW crowd for filling the ballroom. I hope it was worth it to witness us point at slides filled with code.

The panel yesterday went very well. Thanks to the code-hungry attendees for filling a ballroom for the most technical panel of the conference! John has posted the slides from the talk. Audio will be released eventually, but I don’t know when.

I must be slacking off: SXSW has already started and I still haven’t penned the “come to my panel” post. So here it is.

On Tuesday, I will be sharing the mic with several brilliant individuals whose feet I am not qualified to wash: Sam Stephenson, Thomas Fuchs, John Resig, and Alex Russell. To drive home how high the bar is: I will be the only person on that stage who has not written his own enormously popular JavaScript library.

We’ll be revealing the secrets of JavaScript libraries. To my dismay and disappointment, the “secrets” to be shared will include nothing scandalous. We will drop no dimes. We’ll simply talk about how you can use some of the techniques we employ as problem-solving strategies in your own code.

It’s a shame, too, because I have a whole lot of dirt on my colleagues. I’d been saving it up for my gigantic, Zed Shaw–like “fuck you guys, I’m outta here” blog post (tentatively scheduled to happen ~18 months from now), but I can’t let this opportunity slip by.

Are you ready, Internet? Here are the real secrets of JavaScript libraries:

• Sam Stephenson has a reputation for being reclusive and mysterious, disappearing from IM and mailing lists for weeks at a time. Not true! He simply has crappy DSL service at home. The contract he signed with the phone company has a guarantee of only 5% uptime.
• The Dojo Toolkit got its name in 2004 when Alex Russell was inspired to write 6,000 lines of JavaScript after watching The Karate Kid, Part II on TNT.
• At the risk of undermining our efforts, I must reveal that the Prototype developers have been lobbying the ECMAScript 4 working group to introduce several new characters as valid to use in identifiers: £, ¢, and €. We need more currency symbols with which to name functions.
• John Resig has murdered people. No, seriously.

  Actually, I suppose that doesn’t count as a secret about JavaScript libraries. So… oops. Sorry, John.

• When Jon Snook stopped using Prototype exclusively, and started experimenting with Mootools and jQuery, I cried for a week. Then I cut him out of all my photographs, removed his RSS feed from my reader, and moved on. (But I still pretend there is no such place as “Canada.”)

• The human you know as “Douglas Crockford” does not exist. He began as an anthorpomorphized straw-man: we created a web site, placed interesting content therein, but added a controversial and/or nonsensical article every so often so that one of us could post a masterful rebuttal on his personal blog. The whole thing was an elaborate scheme to drive up traffic and make ourselves look good.

  When people started taking these writings seriously, and invited Crockford to speak at conferences, we hired an actor to assume the persona. In other words: Doug Crockford is to the JavaScript community as Tony Clifton was to Andy Kaufman. So if someone comes up to you, extends his hand, and says, “Hi, I’m Doug Crockford,” play along! You’ll be participiating in a subersive ruse!

See you on Tuesday, folks. Assuming I haven’t been assassinated by then.

Don’t get me wrong: on balance, I’m thrilled with the standards support in Internet Explorer 8. But I’ll highlight two areas that really disappoint me. The first is the fact that IE’s proprietary event system is here to stay. The second is that, apart from generated content, giant parts of CSS 2.1 are still unsupported (like :first-child). This dilutes the value of IE8’s support for the Selectors API. If you’re running the beta, this test page will tell you whether it groks a particular selector. I’m sure all this will come up at select SXSWi panels.