Posts tagged: WEB DEVELOPMENT

1. W3C Relaunches HTML Activity
2. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group Notices W3C Relaunching HTML Activity, Seems Pleased

I’m not trying to cop out of learning actual Javascript, honest. My copy of the DOM Scripting book is on its way and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot. And I like almost everything about Javascript (except the curly braces and semicolons). I still remember reading an article by Simon Willison several years ago which demonstrated techniques for standards-compliant and elegant use of Javascript. Like many who lived through The Great DHTML Frenzy circa 2000, I found this idea completely shocking at the time. Now it’s finally sinking in.

I was working on a sharp little post about the bewildering array of available Javascript libraries and how I had almost become resigned to collecting lists-of-lists-of-libraries for future analysis. Then, while I was mulling this over, a neato Javascript library demo I was running crashed Safari, taking my post with it.

Lesson 1: I will remember to always use “Edit in TextMate” in the future.

Lesson 2: I won’t get too excited about cramming my pages full of Javascript.

Each year I spend some time doing research on inexpensive web hosting options for my students. It’s virtually impossible to find a cheap hosting company whose name doesn’t produce copious results for a Google search on “FoobarHost.net sucks”. The predominating mood for me at the end of this research is always: I’m really glad I have more than $10/month to spend on hosting.

Since fall 2003 I’ve had a FreeBSD VPS with JohnCompanies, and it’s really quite excellent. They are a high-performance, no-nonsense, technically oriented provider. When you ask a support question, you get a reply from an actual human being whose first assumption is that you know what you’re doing.

A small but common task in web interfaces, especially “admin” (back-end, content manager) interfaces, is sequencing items. Any time you have a collection of objects that requires arbitrary, user-defined ordering (i.e. ordering that can’t be derived from the objects’ values) you are faced with this problem. Navigation is a common example. If people can add items to a dynamically built navigation menu or tree, how do we let them specify the ordering so that “Contact” can appear below “About Us” or vice-versa?