Javascript
typeface.js is promising
I read today about typeface.js and it’s exactly the lightweight replacement that sifr could use. If you are not familiar with sifr, in a nutshell: use whatever font you want, regardless of whether it is installed on your visitors’ computers or not.
Of course, these days, Flash is more popular than ever but if you are a purist, typeface allows you to do without Flash, using the Canvas element. And, even better, since it’s not Flash, it works on iPhone.
If you are looking for a pixel-perfect solution, however, it is not quite ready yet. Not far, but not quite:
- Text replacement does not allow the user to select text in either FireFox or Safari
- font-stretch support is not rendered correctly in Opera
Now, these weaknesses are, I am sure, only temporary and they are the price to pay for being able to specify your text’s rendering using pure CSS (font-stretch: normal)
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ExtPHP: An ExtJS Converter/Wrapper for PHP Developers
It is something that I had to think about in my day job, because my team is migrating to PHP for web development and I believe that we simply do not have enough time for them to learn JavaScript’s intricacies, I needed to be the one person who would have to wrestle JavaScript when problems happened. I therefore needed a way to insulate them from the gory details, which is why I created ExtPHP.
As you may have guessed from subtle hints, such as this entry’s 12-feet tall header, ExtPHP creates a PHP wrapper for ExtJS.
I noticed, at dzone.com, that the last time someone created a wrapper for JavaScript, many readers complained about how intrusive his approach was. Well, be assured that ExtPHP does not foil ExtJS’ non-intrusive take. Of course, with ExtJS itself, it’s up to the developer to decide what kind of style they wish to adopt, and ExtPHP follows suit.
I guess the introduction I wrote in ExtPHP’s documentation explains fairly clearly what the idea is: “ExtPHP is a wrapper for ExtJS. This is version 0.1, so I expect that a lot of things can be improved upon and your feedback is greatly appreciated. ExtPHP can be used to write both intrusive and non-intrusive Javascript, just like ExtJS itself. Use it responsibly. One of the many advantages of this design is that unknown/misspelled/misused methods are detected in your PHP editor rather than forcing you to debug your JavaScript code in your web browser. ”
Documentation? Indeed, I took some time to write a much-needed PDF document. Let me know how I can improve it, I am sure that you will find it lacking - because it is.
Anyway, I am releasing this as a “Technology Preview” and I will greatly appreciate your help beta-testing it.
Cheers.
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jQuery UI now professionally maintained!
Well, this is exciting:
Paul Bakaus, lead jQuery UI developer, announced today that he was hired by Liferay, Inc., of L.A., to work full time on his baby.
As an early adopter, I am very happy to see the project evolve this way. In case you are not familiar with Liferay, they develop open-source products, so all is well 
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About Events Capturing
Dusting Diaz blogs about consuming events in Mozilla.
I’ve always enjoyed his postings but I have to disagree about having to wait for a ‘better’ IE: the same tricks can already be performed in current version of IE.
Simply react to a click event with this code (pasted from nextBBS’ common.php):
// A very experimental private function: consume the original event, if possiblefunction _killEvent(e) { if(e.preventDefault) { e.preventDefault() e.stopPropagation(); } else { e.cancelBubble = true; e.returnValue = false; } } |
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Where is getElementsByClassName()?
Since one of the goals of this blog is to show you how we resolved some of the issues we encounter when writing modern Web applications, allow me to repost this short article that I originall posted at goodjavascript.com
It’s an extremely common problem: you want to retrieve all the “special” links embedded in your web page. Or all the text areas with a certain style.
You looked at someone else’s code and found that they use the method getElementsByClassName() profusely.
However, when you tried, there was no such method.
(more…)
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Create your own WebTop in php/js in no time
They are everywhere: protopage, pageflakes, netvibes et al are free, easy to use -as long as you have a powerful browser- and moderatly eye-pleasing.
SO?
A couple months ago, I wondered how long it would take me to build my own ‘WebTop’ (You can play with it here). The challenge would be to get it to a satisfactory state over a week-end.
Of course, I decided to use existing open-source code for the applications’ primary needs.
(more…)
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