Prior solutions

Previously in the realm of webapp GUI layouting:

• There were a number of interesting proposals to adapt CSS layouting to the needs of GUI application developers. None of them really took off.
• Some JavaScript framework authors took matters into their own hands and implemented surprisingly capable layout on top of traditional CSS. Others (such as Qooxdoo) perform layout calculations in JavaScript and recompute the layout every time they receive a resize event. That is not as smooth as relying on CSS, but leads to more capable solutions.
• Palm presented Enyo, a framework that allows one to dynamically change layout depending on the size of the screen (think cell phone versus tablet).

Grid Layout

Now there is a new proposal out, by Microsoft. It is called Grid Layout. It has got everything one could wish for: Define a grid with flexible and fixed columns and rows, place your HTML elements on that grid, etc. It has the hitherto unavailable option to let content occupy the minimal space possible (e.g. vertically, in a horizontal toolbar at the top of a view). In current CSS-driven and JavaScript-driven solutions, you need to specify pixels as a work-around and that is a very fragile solution.

Chrome does not have bookmark separators like Firefox’s. This post gives you an approximation.

CoffeeScript is a new syntax for JavaScript. The idea is to fix some of JavaScript’s deficiencies while staying so close to it that one can handle the “compiled version” in an emergency. I like the idea, but not all of it is an improvement. This post will first critique CoffeeScript and then present Brendan Eich’s simplified “paren-free JavaScript”.

The “Device APIs and Policy Working Group” (DAP) is working on several interesting APIs:

• Accessing a devices’s contacts and calendar
• Accessing camera and microphone via forms and an API
• Messaging (SMS, MMS, emails)
• Systems info and events (CPU, network, etc.)
• Permissions for device API access
• And more...

Copying links to web pages is tedious, because you have to go to them twice in order to copy both URL and title. The following three bookmarklets help speed up that process by letting you copy everything in one go. Click on a link to try it out or move it to the bookmarks bar to use it later, on any page.

A bookmarklet is a bookmark whose URL (web address) contains a small program that does something useful with the currently displayed web page. To execute the program, you click on the bookmark.

Keywords are commands you can enter in the browser address bar to quickly go to a website and perform, say, a search.

Update 2011-06-25: “Prototypes as classes” is an improved version of this blog post.

In this post we present the Proto API which implements inheritance in JavaScript in a purely prototypal fashion. This contrasts it with all other JavaScript inheritance APIs that the author is aware of.

JavaScript is relatively weak when it comes to reflection and metaprogramming. Let us see what you can and cannot do. This post uses some of the standard methods of ECMAScript 5 (ES5).