Its one of those unnecessary things, but it sure does look pretty, I’m of course talking about animation. Flash or Javascript based, I find it adds that little some extra for the end-user’s experience; allowing them to fully understand the actions taking place by visually seeing components in transition. Most all mainstream libraries support animation in one way or another, and they are all quite impressive, despite the fact the core of each library essentially works the same. read more »

For the most part, I tend to rely on window.onload; its simple, cross-browser, and the alternative onDOMReady functions were unreliable because of the use of browser sniffing. Aside from that, a low byte size in your pages is not only relatively easy to attain, but it should also be kept in mind during development – bandwidth can be a valuable thing. Thus, images shouldn’t result in a long load time and therefore should eliminate the very requirement of an onDOMReady related function. read more »

There is something inherently powerful about what direct data interaction and manipulation is capable of and the ease at which it performs. XSLT may be called a stylesheet but it is nothing like CSS, it deals directly in data management and presentation, utilizing advanced functionality typically reserved for a scripting language. Similar to what Smarty is to PHP templates, XSLT basically defines the rules for rendering an XML file, with one simportant distinction – the data is live. The data is subject to further XSL manipulation after the XML document has been initially tranformed, faciliating many dynamic features. This has great implications on the web applications of the future; loading a widget could be as simple as dynamically loading an XML document which contains all settings and instructions, performing an XSLT transformation and appending the result document within the DOM. With those kind of capabilities the potential for such an application is limitless. read more »

Here I will not only be sharing the latest news, resources, tutorials, and tools but it will also serve as a platform. As a long time supporter and beneficiary of the open source community, I figured it was time to give back. The main focus of my projects will be to fill a certain niche market of open source Javascript, that being library independent and free of browser detection.

You see I have a problem with Javascript libraries in general, it has always been my contention that each project deserves its own library containing only required modules. The facilitation of browser sniffing is just the icing on the cake; more often than not I find it a simple means to an end or an unnecessary shortcut, all you have to do is view the source of some of the most popular Javascript libraries to see examples of this. A solution short of checking the user agent is often easier than one might have thought.

In that spirit, I will be releasing various modules that promise to be lightweight, standalone, cross-browser, and contain no browser sniffing whatsoever. Be warned, I don’t like rewarding or encouraging bad programming, so don’t expect me to support your mistakes; if your working without a doctype, that is your problem!

I look foward to future dialog.