JavaScript Library tutorial that JQuery’s Resig gave at the October 2007 Ajax Experience conference

JavaScript Library Overview » SlideShare (share powerpoint presentations online, slideshows, slide shows, download presentations, widgets, MySpace codes)

Very interesting comparison of the “Big 4″ JavaScript libraries (Prototype, jQuery, YUI, and Dojo). If you’re up in the air over which to use, this might help sway you one way or the other. It’s very interesting to see how similar they all are and makes you think about which approach is best (querying CSS selectors versus grabbing a single DOM element, extending the language or namespacing functionality).

Tags: javascript, yui, jquery, dojo, prototype, libraries, ajax, ria

For Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and later, HTML Components (HTCs) provide a mechanism to implement components in script as Dynamic HTML (DHTML) behaviors. An HTC is an HTML file that contains script and a set of HTC-specific elements that define the component. The component is saved with an .htc extension. This section lists these HTC-specific elements and the members they support.

HTC Reference

How did I not know about these before? Essentially, they let you inject new behaviors into IE. this guy injected :hover onto any class, something that IE 6 and lower don’t support. This guy fixed PNG 24-bit transparency.

Essentially, you include a link to an HTC file (a file ending in .htc or .hta) into your document. Using a JavaScript-based syntax, you can essentially hack through the old IE DOM (or stylesheets, or whatever) and rewrite it to workaround IE limitations.

In the :hover example above, the author parses all the stylesheets and creates a class-based JavaScript workaround. Yep, that’s what you’d usually do to implement :hover, only this is done all behind the scenes: you define your stylesheet as normal, and the HTML Component takes over and extends IE’s behavior to match it.

Couple these with conditional comments, and you can selectively extend versions of Internet Explorer with behaviors they don’t (and should) support.

Like conditional compilation, how did I not know about this by now?

Tags: ie, ie6, ie7, crossbrowser, ie6hover, htc, htmlcomponents

Thermo has basic drawing tools that can be used to wireframe an app, but what really makes Thermo special for designers is that it understands Photoshop images and uses layer data to capture information about various UI elements (the application also plays nice with images from Illustrator and Fireworks).

Adobe Demos “Thermo” RIA Design Tool to Delighted Crowd

Damn.

Edit: Posted this on Ajaxian.

I’ve gone through most prototyping tools that are currently out there, trying to find one that would let designers / IAs easily get their ideas on a screen.

All either require designers to learn how to develop in something (”learn HTML + JavaScript” or “learn mxml for Flex”) or create something too basic for us to use to collaborate on interaction design (”here are a bunch of boxes on a wireframe…look, they moved to the left”).

If this can translate a comp into something that we can work on together as an actual prototype, I’m all for it. If it works as advertised, it could really speed up and help an iterative creative process.

Tags: thermo, adobe, ria, prototyping