Web Info & Tutorials

Back in February, I reviewed the first half of Shawn M. Lauriat’s “Advanced Ajax: Architecture and Best Practices” (Prentice Hall, 2008, 360p). The first four chapters of Lauriat’s book, which focused almost exclusively on client-side technologies, impressed me considerably. But it’s taken me several weeks to get through the remainder of the book, and there’s one reason why: PHP.

The server-side portion of “Advanced Ajax” uses PHP code to illustrate its many and varied lessons about Ajax architecture. It’s not that I have anything against the popular web-development framework and scripting language. It’s just that, after spending my career in the ASP Classic and JSP trenches and slowly ramping up on Rails in the last year, I’m not the ideal target audience for these code samples. Adding “PHP” to the title of the book might have limited its potential audience, but it also would have been more accurate.

That said, there’s a lot of value here for adherents of any server-side framework. Lauriat discusses each topic from a general perspective before diving into the code. The technical approach to a given problem would obviously differ by framework, but the high-level approach wouldn’t. If you don’t mind skimming past the content that doesn’t apply to you, Lauriat’s advice about developing stable, scalable, accessible and secure Ajax applications transcends framework allegiance.

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Howard Rauscher tipped us off to this IE 8 ticket that talks about how opacity and IE 8 strict mode do not jive:

Description

IE8 Strict Mode correctly omits the filter: alpha(opacity=xx) in CSS
which allows the user to specify the opacity in pre-IE8 browsers but
does not implement the CSS3 opacity setting. While I understand that
opacity is part of the CSS3 spec which is not finalized, this leaves
developers with an odd regression in functionality where it is no
longer possible to change opacity on css elements (where as it was
with IE 5.5, IE 6.0, IE 7.0, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, among
others).

Comments

So the fact that this has been labeled as by design suggests that IE8
will be the only browser produced in the last 10 or so years that will
not support opacity in its strictest mode. Thats rediculous. I
understand the wish to be standards compliant but how hard is it to
implement reading the css3 opacity tag (even if it still makes use of
the filter, at least it will exist as a future standards equivelant
tag).

At some point standards has to give way to usability. Mozilla, Opera,
Apple all realize that a few tags that maybe are not official CSS 2
spec still need to be available. If major functionality is missing
from the standards compliant version of IE8, who will use it, even if
it is standards compliant.

You’ll have a whole host of websites that are standards compliant but
need a few features unavailable in standards compliant mode. So these
websites will be setup to use IE7 mode. And then when IE9 comes out
you’ll have to deal with compatibility issues all over again.
Posted by Ames on 3/17/2008 at 3:59 PM

A pretty crazy regression no?

Many of us use the term “Open Web”, yet what does this actually mean. There isn’t a Wikipedia entry on it yet. When you start to think about it, you may be surprised to find out how hard it is to pin down. It is HTTP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS? Brad Neuberg argues that they are just technologies that right now happen to implement the core philosophies behind it in his opinion piece What’s the Open Web and Why Is It Important?

• Decentralization - Rather than controlled by one entity or centralized, the web is decentralized — anyone can create a web site or web service. Browsers can work with millions of entities, rather than tying into one location. It’s not the Google or Microsoft Web, but rather simply the web, an open system that anyone can plug into and create information at the end-points.
• Transparency - An Open Web should have transparency at all levels. This includes being able to view the source of web pages; having human-readable network identifiers, such as URLs; and having clear network entry points, such as HTTP and REST exposes.
• Code Hackable - It should be easy to lash together and script the different portions of this web. MySpace, for example, allows users to embed components from all over the web; Google’s AdSense, another example, allows ads to be integrated onto arbitrary web pages. What would you like to hack together, using the web as a base?
• Open - Whether the protocols used are de-facto or de-jure, they should either be documented with open specifications or open code. Any entity should be able to implement these standards or use this code to hook into the system, without penalty of patents, copyright of standards, etc.
• From Gift Economies to Free Markets - The Open Web should support extreme gift economies, such as open source and Wikis, all the way to traditional free market entities, such as Amazon.com and Google. I call this Freedom of Social Forms; the tent is big enough to support many forms of social and economic organization, including ones we haven’t imagined yet.
• Third-Party Integration - At all layers of the system third-parties should be able to hook into the system, whether creating web browsers, web servers, web services, etc.
• Third-Party Innovation - Parties should be able to innovate and create without asking the powers-that-be for permission.
• Civil Society and Discourse - An open web promotes both many-to-many and one-to-many communication, allowing for millions of conversations by millions of people, across a range of conversation modalities.
• Two-Way Communication - An Open Web should allow anyone to assume three different roles: Readers, Writers, and Code Hackers. Readers create content, Writers create content, and Code Hackers create new network services that empower the first two roles.
• End-User Usability and Integration - One of the original insights of the web was to bind all of this together with an easy to use web browser that was integrated for ease of use, despite the highly decentralized nature of the web. The Open Web should continue to empower the mainstream rather than the tech elite with easy to use next generation browsers that appear highly usable and integrated despite having an open infrastructure. Open should not mean hard to use. Why can’t we have the design brilliance of Steve Jobs coupled with the geek openness of Steve Wozniak? Making them an either/or is a false dichotomy.

He goes on to talk about the importance of the Open Web, and details of a talk that he is giving at the Open Web Vancouver conference.

What are your thoughts on the Open Web? What do you agree or disagree with in Brad’s thoughts? I am curious how divergent we all are!

Maybe it is “Open” Wednesday. Jon Ferraiolo of the OpenAjax Alliance reached out to ask your thoughts on a browser wishlist. I have been talking about OpenID and Jabber as well other things and now it is our turn to think about what we need.

Coach Wei is leading this task force and posted himself on the initiative.

The OpenAjax Alliance is developing an Ajax industry wishlist for future browsers, using a dedicated wiki for this initiative. The main purpose of the initiative is to inform the browser vendors about what future features are most important to the Ajax community and why. So far, the alliance has interviewed roughly a dozen industry leaders, including representatives from the ASP.NET AJAX, Dojo, Ext JS, Douglas Crockford of JSON fame, jQuery, Spry, and XAP, and recently held a townhall discussion on the feature request list among its members. The members have concluded that the wishlist (~25 items) is ready for public comments.

The alliance is now issuing a call-to-action to Ajax developers to participate in this initiative, which is open to both OpenAjax Alliance members and to non-members. The alliance especially would like participation from Ajax toolkit developers and leading web developers with expertise in using open browser technologies to achieve rich user experiences. To join the effort, create a wiki login for yourself by following the instructions on the wiki home page. After you have a login, you can then add new feature requests or comment on existing feature requests as you see fit. The initiative operates on an honor-system basis.

The moderators have attempted to make it possible that the community can add comments and vote on particular feature requests without large time commitments. For example, it is possible to simply vote for your favorite feature requests by adding a single row to a wiki table. The alliance’s wiki uses the same markup language as wikipedia.

Here is the timeline:

• April - Phase I review, where participants not only add comments, but also are asked to identify their Top 5 features (i.e., those features that are most critical for inclusion in next-generation browsers).
• May - The moderators reorganize and possibly trim away feature requests for which little interest was shown.
• June - Phase II review, where participants will be asked to provide importance ratings for each of the feature requests on a scale of 0.0 to 5.0.
• July - The moderators will produce a summary report and notify the major browser vendors about the results.

Ian Hickson has blogged most the performance lateral of Acid 3:

The Acid3 effort says “To transfer the test, a application staleness ingest its choice settings, the aliveness has to be smooth, the reason has to modify on 100/100, and the effort tender has to countenance exactly, element for pixel, same this meaning rendering”. (Emphasis mine.)

There has been whatever discourse as to what “the aliveness has to be smooth” means.

The intent is to attain trusty that browsers pore on action as substantially as standards. Performance isn’t a standards-compliance issue, but it is something that affects every Web authors and users. If a application passes every 100/100 subtests and gets the action pixel-for-pixel precise (including the favicon!), then it has passed the standards-compliance parts of the Acid3 test. The rest is meet a rivalry for who crapper be the fastest.

To watch the “score” for action in a application that gets 100/100, utter on the “A” of “Acid3″ on the effort after having separate the effort twice (so that the effort uses the browser’s cache). An signal should imbibe up, gift a turn instance elapsed, and news whatever tests that took individual than 33ms. Test 26 is the exclusive digit that should verify whatever momentous turn of time, as it contains a dripless wrap doing whatever ordinary DOM and JS operations. The effort has “passed”, for the purposes of the “smoothness” criteria, if every the tests took inferior than 33ms (it’ll provide you a communication locution “No JS errors and no timing issues.” if this happens). Then the exclusive supply is the turn instance — is it faster than every the another browsers?

This is cushy to nitpick (Ian talks most the “what hardware?” question) but it is quite modify to wager action existence conception of the standards.

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