JavaScript is the world’s most misunderstood programming language, and even if we use them from about 10 years, there is still confusion about the basis of its prototypal inheritance nature.

JavaScript Prototypal Inheritance - My 5 Cents From Web Reflection

Andrea Giammarchi is a very smart guy, and this is a very good read of the inner-workings of JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance structure.

Tags: javascript, prototypal inheritance

Wow. Must-pass-along. Probably the most creative/artistic/pure awesome piece of art I’ve seen in a long, long time. Brian Dettmer’s insanely creative Book Autopsies via 37signals.

Tags: art

The hack Skip Intro was the perfect commentary on Flash madness. Set to an oh-so-current musical score and using all the best of Flash’s moving and shaking features, Skip Intro danced itself into user experience fame by throwing back the curtain on the true perceptions of the Flash site intro.

adaptive path » blog » Kate Rutter » Happy birthday, Skip Intro

Well, at least "skip intro" is now firmly ingrained in web culture. Unfortunately, so are the "do-nothing" puff pieces.

Tags: flash, design

Google’s updated Google maps street view with a bit of St. Patrick’s day magic. These little “easter eggs” just help add a smile to Google’s user experience.

With maps, Google already built a delightful experience. Tack these little "extras" on here and there, and you continue to identify "fun, novel experience" with the Google brand.

Download the Internet Explorer 8 beta and check out all the stuff I blogged about yesterday. (Via the mighty Slashdot.)

Tags: ie8, internet explorer 8

How do I make my site ‘light up’ with Internet Explorer 8?

Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit

Looks like IE8 is knocking off all the standard, next-release browser stuff, weighing in with cross-domain requests, DOM storage and a selector API. HTCs are still there (hooray?). No word on conditional comments or compilation, but I’d guess they would have publicized taking them out.

Some new things:

• Opening up the pipeline to six requests per server: thanks, because the old 2-requests per really hurts!
• Building in online- and offline-detection right in the browser: I’d imagine this will hook into the Silverlight offline API somehow someday. It kind of mitigates the need for something like Google Gears when coupled with DOM storage, too.
• “AJAX navigation”: this looks to be a way of maintaining state in an application by writing directly to the history hash. Really, really nice if they’ve done this. For example, I go to a page, click a tab and the tab loads Ajax-ically. I can then update the browser’s address bar showing the new tab and store this new location in history, letting me bookmark the tab or, later on, jump back with a click of the back button. Entire libraries have popped up trying to handle this state management, and here’s a solution that does it in the browser. Could be powerful stuff.
• Cross-IFRAME requests: Paul Irish and I had a discussion on this last week. IE8 has an API built for it, rendering a bunch of that hackery moot as IE has built an API around it.

IE8 is looking like a blend of catching up, fixing bugs, and innovating. I really like some of the features they’re putting in, but, until other browsers have them, they’re introducing another non-standard way of doing things. But, like innerHTML or XMLHTTPRequest, maybe they’ll help standardize things a bit.

Tags: ie8

My favourite AJAX ide Aptana still doesn’t support YUI 2.5 (latest stable version supports 2.3.1) so i decided to write a plugin for YUI 2.5.0,.. and i would like to share it with all of you guys … just download the YUI 2.5.0 plugin for Aptana and drop it in the plugins folder of Aptana, and restart Aptana.

YUI 2.5.0 plugin for Aptana | Gaurav Verma

Since Aptana’s own team is a bit behind, Gaurav Verma put together this little YUI 2.5.0 helper for Aptana. Now you can create a glorious YUI 2.5.0 project from the Aptana project wizard and enjoy all the benefits thereof.

Tags: yui, aptana

Dear IA People:
I love your Tokyo subway map of all the major Internet properites in the world. The “Google block” in the top-right corner is fantastic, and it really speaks volumes about the nature of P2P when The Pirate Bay sits alongside Flickr and Reddit. But, can you please get rid of the snap.com snapshots? And fit the whole thing above the fold? Thanks IA folks.

Edit: Whoops, forgot to actually link to it.

(Via the always-great information aesthetics).

Tags: ia, subway, internet

One method deserves special attention: elementFromPoint(). This method expects two coordinates and then reports which HTML element is located at these coordinates. This is a godsend for drag-and-drop scripts. If the user drops an element, get the mouse coordinates and use this method to find out which HTML element is located at these coordinates.One catch: you first have to temporarily hide the dragged element, because otherwise elementFromPoint() would always report the dragged element — after all it itself is the topmost element under the mouse.

Google Reader (1000+)

PPK reports on the new W3C CSSOM spec. I’ve wanted a getElementFromPoint() method forever.

Tags: dom, css, javascript

In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting “Standards” mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s “IE7 Standards mode” will need to request that explicitly (using the http header/meta tag approach described here).

IEBlog : Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8

A pretty dramatic reversal. Actually, a complete 180: you’ll need to opt back to IE7-mode in IE8, which will use it’s standards-compliant rendering mode by default.

I guess I could go either way on this one. One could argue that this is default behavior on the web: as Webkit or Gecko improve in Safari and FireFox, older pages might certainly break in them and it’s the responsibility of developers to keep their pages compliant. On the other hand, one could argue that this harms user experience as there will be a vast amount of pages that will never be updated, ever.

I’ll side with the standards on this one, though: web standards are there for a reason, and I’m glad IE will finally join in with honoring them. They’re standards for a reason: they’re not something that should be opted into; they’re a default way of behaving that IE8 seems to be getting right in honoring.

Tags: ie8, webdevelopment, cross-browser