Today I’m going to be talking about Object.extend
without much introduction or context. Bear with me. This is a prerequisite blog post for something I’ll be talking about in a few days.
Category: Articles
Filibusted
Here’s the short version: I made a site called Filibusted that just won Sunlight Labs’ “Apps for America” contest.
Tough Love
Jason Scott rips into Joe Clark. I have learned a number of things from Joe Clark, and I still find reason to link someone to i let u b u at least once per quarter. But I can’t find much fault with this assessment of his words and his worldview.…
Paginate THIS
Here’s a lovely pagination control I looked at on PSDTUTS today. Actually, first I used it; when it took me to a page I was not expecting, I hit the Back button and looked at it. It’s a testament to both my arrogance and my compulsiveness that I found five…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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.