It has by far been the most popular thing to come out of this blog since its inception, and I am very proud to officially release version 2, and this time I’ve included all the bells and whistles you’ve been asking for! The framework now boasts support for an impressive amount of transitions, CSS multi-unit support (em, %, ex, and all the rest), and many more optimizations for increased performance to get those smooth animations we all want. read more »

As a followup to my last post regarding browser detection, I have decided to release a new standalone and lightweight library that will hopefully put browser sniffing to rest once and for all. In a project I’ve entitled Env (short for environment), you now have the power of knowing exactly what your browser environment is and is not capable of without actually knowing what browser it is. Many of the features and bugs that are often encountered during runtime no longer need to be sniffed out by the user agent, despite the fact that some of the mainstream libraries still insist upon it. In addition to bug and feature testing, the library also supports advanced type detection and event support detection to further enhance your usability, but also separate your dependence on browser sniffing. Goodbye navigator.userAgent and good riddens – you’ve broken my app for the last time! read more »

Right off the bat, I should say I don’t expect this project to be used in any real-world applications, as the amount of overhead is substantial and performance could suffer, so use at your own risk. Instead, this project is about demonstrating the versatility of JavaScript; it is common practice these days to build on top of the language and extend upon its native capabilities due to a lack of support for various functions and implementations found in other languages. This has lead to many of the countless hacks and extensions found in most modern day libraries, such as inheritance, native object extensions (Array), dynamic script injection, animation, and CSS selector engines to name a few. Now you can add one more to the list; class type and invariant declaration and validation. read more »

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 »