Web Info & Tutorials

After hundreds of man months, the marketing team behind IE has come up with a name (which has been holding back the product). They looked at:

• IE 7+1
• IE VIII
• IE 1000 (think binary)
• IE Eight!
• iIE
• IE for Web 2.0 (Service Pack 2)
• IE Desktop Online Web Browser Live Professional Ultimate Edition for the Internet (the marketing team really pushed for this one ;-)
• Ie2.079 (we might still use this for the Math Major Edition)

and ended up with IE8. They also let people know that silence != inaction:

Of course, some people care about other aspects of IE8 much more than they care about the name. As I’ve walked different people through the plan, I’ve gotten “Does it have feature X?” “When is the beta?” “When does it release” and even the more thoughtful “What are you trying to accomplish with this release?”

You will hear a lot more from us soon on this blog and in other places. In the meantime, please don’t mistake silence for inaction.

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager

Drawing on inspiration from Plotr and PlotKit, software developer Ole Laursen wanted to bring the same plotting functionality to jQuery. So he built his own jQuery plugin and called it Flot. While a bit oddly named, the first release of Flot, v0.1, already provides some impressive capabilities:

The project actually got started because we were growing dissatisfied with Plotr which looks nice but is pretty dumb when it comes to auto-detecting stuff and didn’t have any interactive features which we needed for a custom web-based business intelligence application.

Demos of the Flot plugin can be found at Ole’s site. The code for the plugin is hosted via Google Code.

When Silverlight came out of the gate, some were pretty surprised to see that there were no UI controls such as buttons. Really? I have to draw the components myself? You could tell that they went after Flash.old. Well, this was a 1.x release, and it is getting better. Scott Guthrie just announced some plans for Silverlight where they changed the version of 1.1 to 2.0, but also added:

• Rich Controls: Silverlight will deliver a rich set of controls that make building Rich Internet Applications much easier. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for core form controls (textbox, checkbox, radiobutton, etc), built-in layout management controls (StackPanel, Grid, etc), common functionality controls (TabControl, Slider, ScrollViewer, ProgressBar, etc) and data manipulation controls (DataGrid, etc).
• WPF UI Framework: The current Silverlight Alpha release only includes basic controls support and a managed API for UI drawing. The next public Silverlight preview will add support for the higher level features of the WPF UI framework. These include: the extensible control framework model, layout manager support, two-way data-binding support, and control template and skinning support. The WPF UI Framework features in Silverlight will be a compatible subset of the WPF UI Framework features in last week’s .NET Framework 3.5 release.
• Rich Networking Support: Silverlight will deliver rich networking support. The next Silverlight preview release will add support for REST, POX, RSS, and WS* communication. It will also add support for cross domain network access (so that Silverlight clients can access resources and data from any trusted source on the web).
• Rich Base Class Library Support: Silverlight will include a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage, etc). The next Silverlight preview release will also add built-in support for LINQ to XML and richer HTML DOM API integration.

In Cross Site Scripting Joy, saint Betts has condemned the instance to go into actual discourse on XSS and the recreation and frolics that we hit with the Same Origin Policy and beyond:

So the effort over XSS as a section difficulty has touched on from the aforementioned lineage policy, but aforementioned lineage relic a large impediment to utilization of multipurpose non-malicious services, and that’s specially genuine of Comet, because there are typically digit servers participating in some comet setup: a scheme computer same Apache, and a comet computer same Meteor or Orbited.

There are essentially threesome choices for making these digit servers endeavor together:

1. marry them: hit digit computer that serves both your Comet connections and the accepted ones (including some dynamically generated content);
2. have a lawful scheme computer with a Comet computer movement in face of it, so every connections are prefabricated to the Comet server, and it proxies the non-comet connections to the scheme server;
3. have both the Comet and the lawful scheme computer unclothed to the web, and letter practical noesis from apiece one.

Andrew then definite to write a clump of tests (38 in fact) to wager how the SOP is implemented in different browsers, and ended up with the mass complete information:

The YUI library has one of the longest release cycles around but when they put out a release, the team definitely makes it worth it. Yahoo! just released YUI v2.4.0 with a host of new features that will surely please the YUI faithful.

New Selector Engine

In YUI 2.4.0, the Yahoo! team introduces it's first foray into providing a CSS selector engine, called the Selector Utility. Similar to other libraries such as jQuery and Prototype. the new class adds support for most pseudo-classes, attribute operators, and combinators as defined by the W3C. While most projects have focused on improving performance, the YUI team focused on ensuring str0ng selector support, an approach that definitely makes sense for this initial implementation.

Dustin Diaz has written up his thoughts on the selector engine and shows some examples such as:

YUI Charts Control

Getting some assistance from the Yahoo! Flash Platform team, YUI now adds support for charting. The control is a hybrid JavaScript/Flash component that supports bar, line, and pie charts and integrates with the YUI DataSource Utility for pulling data.

Profiler

When Yahoo! released YSlow, you knew they were serious about application performance and that's carried over into YUI with the new YUI Profiler.

The new the YUI Profiler allows you to target specific code for profiling and to retrieve profiling data programmatically while your application is running — in any A-Grade browser. In combination with Nicholas’s YUI Test Utility, Profiler allows you to build unit tests in which success or failure is predicated on performance benchmarks.

JSON Utility

Leveraging Douglas Crockford’s JSON parser and stringify functionality, the YUI team created the new JSON Utility which provides improved methods for working with JSON. Tasks such as JSON-to-string and string-to-JSON conversion and validation are now a core part of the library which I'm sure will make many developers very happy.

In addition to these great features, substantial enhancements have been made to the:

• YUI Calendar Control.
• YUI Button Class
• Drag & Drop Utility API
• YUI Rich Text Editor

A complete overview of the new features and changes Yahoo! just released YUI v2.4.0 can be seen at the YUI Blog.

YUI v2.4.0 is immediately available for download and the full documentation can found here.

Congrats to the YUI team!