Sam Foster and I are once again leading a JavaScript discussion for Refresh Austin — this time focusing on the major libraries and on practical problem‐solving. Show up tonight at 7pm for the Dojo vs. Prototype girly slap‐fight! You won’t be disappointed.
Category: Tumbles
AIM Lite, also known as LAIM. Also known as “the no‐headaches AIM client.” Also known as “the AIM client you should make your parents install immediately.” It’s interesting not only because it’s an excellent, non‐bloated piece of software to come from AOL, but also because it uses Boxely, the XUL‐like UI toolkit that Joe Hewitt has raved about.
Web design is 95% typography. So what if we have only a handful of fonts to work with? Creativity thrives under constraints. Look at Daring Fireball or Coudal Partners and observe how typography can fully define a site’s identity.
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.
Aaron & Justin
At Bukowski’s late Tuesday night.
Lots of great stuff has been going on at The Ajax Experience — I’ll post pictures once I get back — but I thought this was notable enough to share right now: until Douglas Crockford mentioned it at a panel last night, I was unaware that Opera 9 now identifies itself as only Opera 9 in its user agent string, reversing a ridiculous decade‐long trend of browsers pretending to be some form of Mozilla. Type navigator.userAgent into a JavaScript console and see for yourself; my version says it’s Opera/9.01 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X; U; en). The truth will set you free.
Dead Rising
For the first five days I owned an Xbox 360, this disc barely left the machine. On top of the ridculously‐high replay value, this game is also a really fascinating look at what Japan thinks about American culture. The “Mark of the Sniper” scene (grab the game script and do a search) seemed to be a direct rebuttal to the 1992 Rodney Peairs/Yoshi Hattori incident.
If you’re going to The Ajax Experience, I’ll probably see you there. I’m getting on a plane tomorrow at an intolerable time before sunrise and will wind up in Boston sometime around 1pm. I look forward to several of the panels — and especially Brendan Eich’s keynote — but will also be thrilled to share a beer with those whose code I have used (and whose work I have copied) for over a year now: Justin Palmer, Dan Webb, Aaron Gustafson, John Resig, and other ninja‐like entities.
There were two schools as to why people kicked barefoot. Neither made any sense. The first was that it provided the kicker with a better “feel” for the ball itself and that this gave him greater control of its trajectory; I recall an argument that claimed making a kicker wear a shoe was like making a quarterback wear a mitten. I can only assume this argument was made by people who threw like Garo Yepremian.
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.