Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 was released today. There are several cool UI enhancements that this beta brings to the table that I won't cover in this post, but you can learn more about them on the IEBlog. Instead, I want to talk about how beta 2 affects IE's relationship to web standards. First, CSS Expressions [...]
Earlier this month, we released a preview of the next generation of YUI — YUI 3.x. We’ve already gotten a lot of valuable feedback from members of the YUI 3.x community forum; thanks to everyone who’s downloaded the preview and started evaluating the new APIs. Next week, we’d like to invite you over for [...]
IE8 beta 2 has been released. Go get it; let's see what works and what doesn't. See also the release notes. I'm currently downloading it; more news when I have it. Update: CSS compatibility table updated. I'm especially enthousiastic about...
Many projects benefit from package-based distribution with dependencies. Famously, Perl has CPAN and Debian has apt. It can be argued these two projects are alive and successful because of CPAN and apt. Various packages can be downloaded from central server package repositories and installed on a local machine. If one package has declared dependencies on other packages then those other packages are installed also. Many package management systems are quite similar and it would make sense if they could use the same package management software on the client and sever.
xpkg is just such a bunch of generic package management tools. I've extracted these tools from the xjs project and these tools will be able to work on the client and server for any project that could benefit from package distribution on any operating system. Think of things like a central emacs extensions repository, a central C library repository, a central anything plugin repository. There are plenty of projects that could benefit from package-based distribution and a central package repository but cannot justify writing the software to manage the packages on the client or server. xpkg to the rescue.
While we posted about the Gears 0.4 features a lot of the press only really talked about the Geolocation piece. I think that is important, and posted on that too, but Brad's piece discussed the full gamut including the Blob API, resummable HTTP, and Desktop API improvements to allow controlled file system access. The example [...]
Mozilla Labs releases the Ubiquity add-on for Firefox. In a nutshell: With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.
Big congrats to Aza and everyone else who worked on this! As innovative as Humanized was, building something similar into Firefox is genius. Personally I am excited by the prospect of developing work flows on the Ubiquity platform. There are so many common work flows that need simplification.
Developers: If you want to cut to the chase, Ajaxian shows how easy it is to create custom commands. And of course, the details are in the Authoring Tutorial.
You have seen this before: /path/to/something.js?v=2, or maybe it used a date or a version control id or some such. The notion of putting the version into the URL so you can aggressively cache and yet quickly push new versions. There has long been issues with using the querystring as the version. At some point I [...]
A little while ago, we talked about the two competing custom font technologies for the Web: linking and "embedding" (aka EOT). With Firefox about to implement support for linking à la Safari, John Allsopp has a summary of the state of font technologies and an illustration of just how easy it is to use these [...]
Aza Raskin and the Mozilla Labs team have launched Ubiquity the command line tool that they have been talking about for awhile. Ubiquity is "experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily." The overall [...]
Andy Pemberton has put together a simple solution to get the watermark technique to work nicely with print CSS. Check out the sample and pull up a print preview. He details the good, bad, and ugly:
The Good The first step to getting a printable watermark is to use an inline tag, rather than background-images. In most [...]
Just recently I published a new pattern, Sign-in Continuity, to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. It could filed under “Engagement,” a category we have internally but that hasn’t appeared yet here, but I decided to put it in the “Social” category instead. The pattern is about making sure that a user’s momentum isn’t robbed when they [...]
In the “oh wow, I didn’t know JavaScript could do that” category, I just came across a cool new jQuery plugin called jParallax which implements a parallax effect on selected elements. Now, I’m not ashamed to admit not knowing what “parallax” meant so I looked it up on Wikipedia which totally added closure to the [...]
Last week I wrote a simple WhereAreYou? application that used the Google Ajax APIs ClientLocation API to access your location via your IP address. At the same time, we announced support for the Gears Geolocation API that can calculate your address using a GPS device, WiFi info, cell tower ids, and IP address lookups. Add to all [...]
John has announced the Firebug 1.2 final release. As well as just supporting Firefox 3, there are some quality improvements:
The Script panel (the JavaScript debugger), the Net panel (network monitoring), and Console panel have all seen considerable updates. They’re all much more performant and have a huge number of bug fixes. Specifically the Console panel has [...]
Aza Raskin and the Mozilla Labs team looks like they are having a lot of fun. They have been putting up proposals for new UIs and the latest involves a smarter new tab screen. Aza discusses how opening a blank screen doesn’t really help you. Opera already allows you to have a quick dial screen show [...]
The preparations for Fronteers 2008 proceed apace; it’s likely to become an excellent conference. (Amsterdam, 11 and 12 September.)
That’s right, a free pass! We are raffling off one free pass to The Ajax Experience show in Boston, September 29 – October 1. That means that you can attend the $1495 event for free, courtesy of Ajaxian.com. There’s no catch. We are giving away one free pass to The Ajax Experience. The free pass only [...]
Razor Profiler is a web-based Ajax profiling tool to help web developers understand and analyze the runtime behavior of their JavaScript code in a cross-browser environment. Razor Profiler can be access either online as a service; or be downloaded to run locally, and was created by Coach Wei who has done a lot of work [...]
Dave Kuhn has put together a comprehensive guide to piecing together GWT and Spring, a nice recipe for the Java heads among you. Dave starts out by detailing why you would want to do this, and how it changes the architecture of your application. He then gets to a tutorial that has you creating the project correctly, [...]
John Resig is a machine. Not content with dividing his time between working on jQuery and working on Firebug, he’s also got another few irons in the fire.
Just for kicks, John has created a standalone selector engine called Sizzle. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet but it looks very promising. It uses the CSS syntax that has helped make jQuery such a popular library. Right now, the code is coming in at less than 4K!
I really, really like this modular approach to writing JavaScript. Instead of bloating a library with more features, the components of the library are instead being split into separate standalone pieces. I wonder if the same thing will happen with event handling and effects. Those three actions (selector, event, effect) probably make up 80% of jQuery use cases:
jQuery(selector).event(function() {
effect();
});
For an event of a different kind, there’s a jQuery Camp scheduled for September 28th, the day before The Ajax Experience in Boston. The exact location has yet to be determined but given the number of jQuery fanboys out there, I’m guessing it won’t be ‘round at John’s house. There’s a nominal registration fee of $50 to cover lunch. If you use jQuery and you find yourself anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the United States at the end of September, you should probably register now.
In his spare time, John likes to relax by porting the Processing visualisation language to JavaScript. Freak.
Jacob Seidelin finishes up his binary meme with a post on reading image metadata with JavaScript via a library that groks EXIF data.
It tries to detect the format of the image file and then reads the header and pulls out information about dimensions and color depth among other things. If the EXIF data library is [...]
John Resig is working on a new selector engine called Sizzle:
This is a new selector engine that I’m working on. It’s a work in progress! Not ready for use yet! It’s definitely not ready yet (got some minor outlier bugs in the standards-compliant browsers - and a bunch of major bugs in IE still left to tackle) [...]