People who write about very specific things, I’ve found, often have the most interesting things to say. Steven Levithan writes Flagrant Badassery, which covers JavaScript and regular expressions. Steven’s XRegExp library does some killer stuff that the native JS RegExp does not; at only 2.4KB, it’s a must‐have for grepping and/or parsing on the client side.
Category: Links
Chris Mills looks at Dragonfly, Opera’s new Firebug‐ish developer panel. It’s not Firebug, but it’s much closer thereto than the competition from IE and Safari.
Mark says it best, once again. Mozilla’s absence from the Cannonball Run–style race to comply with Acid 3 was disappointing. They’d have come in third place, but that’s not the point. If you play, you win. If you make excuses, grumble about the rubric, or quibble over minutiae, you lose.
GitHub just went live. No invite required. Sign up and start hacking on Prototype!
The UK is unveiling some new currency hotness. H&FJ place things in perspective. I’m willing to tolerate the giant purple numeral if only they’d give the one‐dollar bill the same makeover as the rest of our bills. Wouldn’t it be nice if our currency, y’know, matched?
After nearly two years of complications from thyroid cancer, Roger Ebert will soon resume writing movie reviews on a regular basis. Ebert’s one of my favorite living writers — he articulates his love of movies so well that I enjoy reading even those reviews I disagree with. I can’t wait until he’s back on the job.
I didn’t know what The Escapist was before Zero Punctuation came into being. But now they’ve got Jason Rohrer, the author of Passage, writing a monthly column/game for them. If they hang onto these guys they’ll be the video game webzine that IGN never was.
Study: John Edwards Doesn’t Exist. Obama’s my candidate, but the fact that he has perhaps benefited from the horserace‐obsessed media coverage of the primaries doesn’t make the process any less painful for me. This is a perfect example of media laziness: Edwards doesn’t fit into the narrative, so he’s passed over in silence.
NBC co‐chairman Ben Silverman recently said that the cancellation of the Golden Globes (as a by‐product of the writers’ strike) felt like “the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom.” So United Hollywood is staging a prom at NBC Studios next week. Formal dress and picket signs. I love sarcastic protests.
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.)