Updates:

• JavaScript’s strict mode: a summary
• es5-shim: use ECMAScript 5 in older browsers

ECMAScript is a language standard that is implemented as JavaScript in most web browsers (it’s called JScript in MS Internet Explorer). Here are two good links to get up to date on the latest version, ECMAScript 5:

The “browser as a platform” is coming along nicely. The following are a few recent developments.

An article examines “Google Maps and Label Readability”. From this article, we can derive the following rules for the design of graphical user interfaces in general (the following numbers and “visual tricks” refer to section in the article). Google Maps manages to be more readable than the competition without showing less information (as measured by a count of labels). It does so via the following means.

Whenever I send automated emails, I prefer to have one last look at them, before sending them off. The following method allows one to do this, as all of the generated emails are opened in your default email program, complete with recipients, subject, and content. Thankfully, this is easy to do, by just sending a properly encoded URL to the operating system. Doing this depends on java.awt.Desktop and thus Java 6.

The following is a list of seven things that frequently bug me about websites.

This blog post summarizes the content of three interesting TED talks on education:

• Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover
• Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums
• Sugata Mitra: How kids teach themselves