Tim Berners‐Lee announces the creation of a new HTML working group, one focused on making more incremental changes than those that have been proposed on the XHTML track. This is great news. Kudos to WHATWG for reminding the W3C that they need to remain focused on things that affect present‐day web developers instead of planning for fifteen years from now.
Category: Links
I don’t know how long ago this happened, but I just noticed that gotAPI.com now has an index of Sergio Pereira’s Prototype documentation. Since it’s based on version 1.4, it’s about eight months out of date, but it’s still handy to have while we work on proper documentation. Expect an exhaustive reference when 1.5 gets a final release.
Ye gods — what a horrible screen. Kids, please don’t design your menus with a for loop.
Hixie’s trying to standardize innerHTML. One simple test gives five different results in 4½ different browsers. I don’t understand how he stays sane.
Nokia releases Carbide.ui, a new skinning application for Series 60. It’s based on Eclipse and is roughly 4,000 times less crappy than its previous offering, S60 Theme Studio. Here’s hoping it leads to equally‐less‐crappy S60 themes.
I consider myself humbly fortunate to have been added as a member of Prototype‘s new core development team. My first patch: optimizing getElementsByClassName. Browsers with XPath support get an eightfold performance gain; others get a modest gain of 50–100%.
Prototype 1.5.0 has a new release candidate. New stuff since my last post: awesome DOM navigation via Element.(up|down|next|previous), Array.uniq, and a few bug fixes. There’s some more cool stuff in the pipeline.
Sorting through my photos of San Francisco, I was reminded how much I love DoubleTake, panorama software designed for human beings. It lets you stitch a series of photos together in an unintimidating manner — something hugin can’t seem to do.
Warrick, the website reconstruction tool. Pulls from search engine caches and the Internet Archive. I’m using it to pull down the Mephisto documentation, which seems to be down at the moment.
A smorgasbord of commits to the Prototype SVN repo, after four months of inactivity. Method chaining, new Element.Methods, object cloning, and this patch I wrote a while back. This is a meat‐filled and much‐needed update.