Painfully Obvious.

The recent mailer from the U.S. Census Bureau struck a chord with two of my hobbies: information design and open government. Today I’ll be redesigning a piece of paper that looks mundane but has an astonishing impact on the amount of money our country is spending to conduct the 2010 Census. Sometimes good design can solve large‐scale problems.

If you don’t know about Raphaël, you’d better ask somebody. It provides a vector drawing API that works in all major browsers (by abstracting between SVG and VML). I’ve been working on a JavaScript charting library called Krang. Krang is designed to take a data set and produce any chart…

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.

Here’s the short version: I made a site called Filibusted that just won Sunlight Labs’ “Apps for America” contest.

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.…

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…

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.

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…

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.

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…