Web Info & Tutorials

Until we get <input type="date" /> into the browsers, we will need to create data pickers.

DatePicker is a simple one that users Prototype and Script.aculo.us, and does the basics well (although the fade can be a touch annoying to me).

It is very simple to use too:

Of course, you could easily wrap this in a microformat so you can just do class="date".

Peter Van Dijck thinks that long pages work and he points to Wikipedia and pages like this as proof.

The content + a lot of comments world can definitely make sense. You can use Cmd+F to hunt around, and the main content is still at the top.

We have in the past been obsessed with "above the fold" and "page views are king". It is really painful when you still see articles split into short chunks, and it leads me to find the "printer friendly" page in very short order.

The iPhone is also showing that scrolling is a nice UI tool, especially when you have lists. The auto-keep-scrolling technique works really well on the phone.

We shouldn't get complacent though, there is a reason why you see heat graphs showing where users click, and if they can't see it, they don't know it's there.

Everyone's throwing up JavaScript functionality left and right, most of the time without giving any thought to accessibility. Not so for Brian Reindel who has created an accessible news slider component which meets the requirements of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0.

Brian really gave the development of this jQuery plugin some good thought as attested by his overview of the functionality:

• The JavaScript is only 2KB compressed.
• The XHTML and JavaScript were developed specifically to meet the WCAG 1.0, and this will always be the number one priority of the plugin. It is suggested that if you modify the XHTML, you do so keeping this in mind.
• Users with color vision deficiency, or color blindness
  The plugin does not use color as a primary indicator of a change in state for the slider. Instead, the "previous" and "next" arrows are either visible or hidden, depending on the location of the news slider. There is also an indicator that communicates the total number of news stories in the slider.
• Users with limited or poor vision, but who do not use a screen reader
  If the user chooses to resize the text via the browser file menu, the slider will flex vertically to accommodate the larger text, and still function. This is primarily a function of the CSS, and it is suggested you maintain a variable font size on your site in order to take advantage of this capability.
• Users that are legally blind, and who browse Web pages with a screen reader
  Since screen readers actually read through the code, it is important that the XHTML be formatted free of confusion. The appropriate skip links and title tags have been included for navigation and messaging. The important thing to remember is that screen readers like JAWS ignore elements with the display property set to "none", or with the visibility property set to "hidden". This helps significantly in managing the presentation to several categories of disabled users.
• Users that browse with the keyboard and an adaptive device such as a mouth stick
  When developing a Web component to be accessible, this is the most difficult group of disabled users to accommodate. If you have ever tried to browse by tabbing through a Web page, it can be frustrating. Although the core functionality of the news slider is partially accessible with a keyboard, the "View All" link was added as a catch-all mechanism.
• Users who have turned off JavaScript or CSS
  The key was to make sure that not only were all the news stories readable with JavaScript or CSS turned off, but that the appropriate messaging was displayed to the user to inform them of the implications. Although not a category that I think fits explicitly under accessibility, it is a component of the WCAG 1.0 checkpoints, and strides were taken to make sure the plugin met these requirements.

You can download the plugin here and you'll need to pick up a copy of jQuery v1.1.3.1 or higher in order to use it.

Here’s the prototypal entry in what we wish module embellish a lawful feature on Ajaxian. The Ajaxian Featured Tutorial module feature a tutorial that we’ve institute engrossing and we conceive the accord module enjoy. Now granted, we actualise that not everyone module encounter it engrossing and we’re alright with that. We poverty to distribute the tutorial fuck equally among the some assorted technologies that attain RIA utilization cushy and fun.

This week, we’ve got a pleasant digit for every of you Adobe Flex aficionados. The boys over at Paranoid Ferret Productions hit a beatific introduction on how to physique digit of the most multipurpose of components, a DataGrid, Flex-style.

If you’re opinion audacious after feat finished their prototypal tutorial, then meet nous on over to part 2 of their DataGrid series where they compound the DataGrid using images and modern styles.

If you’d same limited topics to covered, gratify permit us undergo and we’ll wager what we crapper do.

Jack Herrington and Steve Yen have put together a nice little article introducing TrimPath Junction:

Junction is an all JavaScript framework that closely models the Ruby on Rails model-view-controller design pattern and implementation. And with the help of the Helma JavaScript web server, it runs the same code both on the client and on the server. Exactly the same code, in fact.

The framework not only handles the basics of rendering pages (using JavaScript templating), but it also handles data and code synchronization with the server, local client caching using Google Gears, model versioning, and much more. It's an amazingly complete solution for an entirely new model of web development.

The article walks through the building of a very simple contact management system, and shows that ONLamp doesn't believe in Long Pages ;)

Andreas Ecker, project lead of qooxdoo, sat down to have a chat about the state of the project, how it works, what it does, how it compares to other frameworks like GWT, and how it integrates with third party development environments from Borland and the Eclipse Foundation.

Emre Kıcıman and patriarch Livshits of Microsoft investigate hit created a newborn send titled Ajax View:

The content of the Ajax View send is to meliorate developer’s saliency into and curb over their scheme applications’ behaviors on end-user’s desktops.

The Ajax View move is to append a server-side agent (or scheme machine plugin) in-between the scheme machine machines and the end-user’s browser. This agent captures the scheme application’s JavaScript cipher as it is existence dispatched to a covering and rewrites the cipher to append player arranging code. The injected arranging cipher runs with the rest of the scheme covering exclusive the end-user’s covering and crapper getting performance, call graph, covering land and individual interaction information, providing saliency direct into the terminal jumping of the user’s experience.

Because Ajax View is redaction scheme covering cipher dynamically apiece instance a individual visits the scheme site, it can:

1. Serve assorted arranging cipher to assorted users. This allows us to dispense arranging cipher crossways some users, broad the outlay of assembling lots of aggregation much that no azygos individual pays a broad action penalty.
2. Adapt an arranging contract and support assorted arranging cipher over time. For example, we crapper drill-down into action problems and foregather player environment most bugs

The prototype module falsehood a topical agent machine that rewrites your playscript cipher and instruments it.

A vulgar analyse is:

This is every meet research-y and they “are considering individual forthcoming directions for the project, including boost investigate into arranging policies to support developers debug their application, and the possibilities of desegregation this profession into developer tools and/or scheme machine infrastracture.”

This seems a lowercase weak, though it is meet a investigate project. Someone we every undergo substantially and fuck said this most the project: “with MS Research I would wait a Firebug image with vocalise recognition: computer, superior the 4th div after the ordinal h2 in the ordinal paragraph”

When I first saw an email from Dirk Jesse about YAML, I was instantly in Ruby mode. Then as I read I realised that he was talking about a totally different YAML, his own CSS framework “Yet Another Multicolumn Layout” (compareble to YUI Grids or blueprint) that is designed
for creating flexible float-based multicolumn css-layouts. YAML is
released under creative commons licence.

Dirk told us:

The framework is focussed on flexible layouts and offers column and/or
grid based design elements for flexible, elastic or fixed layouts. YAML
has grown over two and a half years now. Since YAML wasn’t planned to
become a framework, things grew slowly and only with a german
documentenation. Thats I think, is the main reason, why it is almost
unknown outside Germany. This changed with the arival of YAML v3.0 july’07.

YAML is very flexible, comes with a bilingual documentation (PDF, > 100
pages) and - my lastest baby - a builder, that allows visual configuration of the basic layout elements.

The building is a very nice Ajax app in its own right:

The Gears team has rev'd a new version aimed at developers. This release isn't going to propagate to end-user machines yet, as we want to time to hear from the community on the new features and APIs. Speaking of which...

What's new?

Cross Origin API

Until now, there was no way to talk past the strict same-origin security model (same protocol, same exact domain, same port). Sometimes in the real world you need to mashup data, or even talk from www.foo.com to static.foo.com. Now you can do this with a simple API that adds to WorkerPool:

Example

Assume mash-up.com wants to read and write tasks managed by task-list.com.

1. task-list.com hosts workerpool-service.js, which it expects to be loaded by another origin. That .js code uses:
• LocalServer to make itself and any required resources available offline.
• WorkerPool to respond to sendMessage() commands like "getAllTasks"
2. mash-up.com calls createWorkerFromUrl() with the workerpool-service.js URL.
3. The worker can access tast-list.com resources, as it runs in that origin.
4. When mash-up.com calls sendMessage('getAllTasks'), task-list.com reads the database associated with task-list.com and returns the tasks.
• Note that because only task-list.com directly accesses the database, the schema can change without requiring changes to mash-up.com.

Read more of the details.

New HttpRequest API

Workers live in their own world (by design) but what if you need a worker to grab some content. You don't have access to XHR, but now you can use the new HttpRequest module that mimics XHR with a couple of differences.

New Timer API

The Timer module implements the WhatWG Timer specification, and makes it available in both workers and the main HTML page. This is the same timer API that is traditionally available in browsers on the window object.

I got to chat with Chris Prince, an engineer on Gears, about the new release:

Let us know your thoughts. What would you like to see? If you could create a mythical Gear, what would it do? :)

The JavaScript camp can get a bit obsessed with squeezing, and Arthur Blake's CompressorRater tells you how far you can go:

There are many tools available that can help you compress your JavaScript code but it can be time consuming and difficult to analyze which tool work the best for a given situation. The goal of this web application is to report aggregated statistics on the general level of compression in all these tools, as well as allow developers to easily play with and compare the different tools on their own JavaScript code without having to set up all the tools on their own.

The following compression tools are compared, both with and without the affects of additional gzip compression that are supported natively by modern web browsers.

The tool will try all of the usual suspects for you, in various modes. I ran gears_init.js into the sausage factory and got out:

Oh, and it has been a couple of days, so Julien has released a new version of the YUI Compressor (2.1).