This last week saw two big JavaScript projects debut with releases and live code. John Resig has released Processing.js and Richard Herrera has introduced the Flow library.

Processing.js

Unless you’ve been living off the grid you’ve probably seen some mention of John Resig’s ‘big and pretty’ project, Processing.js. He’s gone and done it again, this time with a port of the Processing visualization language to the web via JavaScript and the canvas element. If that means nothing to you visit the site and check out some of the pretty demos.

Is this the beginning of the end of Flash? I’m not gonna go anywhere near that one, but Chris Blizzard has point out a few ways the open web has embraced the code in just a few days.

Flow

Richard Herrera, who I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the last year, has completed and released his JavaScript library — Flow. Sure, you say that the JavaScript library space is already crowded, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for another tool in your arsenal.

Richard has aimed to create a small, lean, code base for cross browser implementation of standard DOM features and the ability to customize the library by picking and choosing the additional features you’d like.

Flow is already in use at the new South Park Studios, and you can see examples and docs and grab the code from its project site.

So here I am a couple weeks after the IE team announced through a variety of different channels their proposal to help cushion the blow of their next browser release through the use of a META declaration and HTTP header, “X-UA-Compatible” describing what browser(s) the page and its associated styles and javascript files target.

I’ve got plenty of thoughts on why vendor extensions and related adjustments to behavior are bad. I also have some concerns over this one in particular. Extensions, and more general workarounds and hacks of all kinds [vendor driven or not] get buried into code, reused, copy and pasted, dropped in application templates, removed by accident, and generally used by people who don’t know why they’re doing it, but instead just because it works. As anything other then a very temporary, one time use solution this doesn’t seem to me to solve any problems that are inherent with either web standards or an ecosystem where content publishers are open to who they let see their content. But let me not get too far off onto that tangent and consider first that the proposed solution goes through.

For the moment I want to focus on the practical — what does the additional rendering mode and the ability to switch to it via META declaration mean to me as a working web developer?

There’s been lots and lots of discussion of the proposals via blogs, mailing lists and other forum, but they’ve focused on either how the proposal was raise and whether its appropriate direction for the technologies web developers work with to take. Through all those discussions however I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around the long term impact of the proposals and how I need to manage my very non-theoretical code and projects. In a search for discussion of these practical examples on how one would start to tailor their code in this new model I’m turning to you all. Can the extensions, and the additional rendering mode they’re implying be worked around with no impact at all, or if it requires new planning on the part of developers, or is it just more of the same planning we’ve been doing for ages.

Right Now

In an XHTML1.0 IE6 & IE7 world my typical structuring of code to ease browser hacking and targeting has been as follows:

• use an XHTML1.0 [transitional or strict] doctype that triggers “not-quirks-mode”
• start code with no browser hacks
• For combined IE6&7 adjustments [hasLayout type stuff usually] use a separate style sheet linked inside conditional comments
• For IE6 but not IE7 use the * html hack when needing to hide stuff, or remember a few extra rules that anyone can get safely [display:inline; float:left;]
• Ignore IE5.x and less
• Keep more complex CSS and other hacks to a bare minimum [e.g. clearfixing, etc.] and instead design and code as ‘universally’ as possible

That has worked for the last 1-2 years in a world that knew nothing about IE8.

With IE8 in our sights

But now we’re in a world that knows IE8 exists which changes things just a little bit if I want to be a responsible web developer. Any document I publish or help a client publish from today on I have to consider [with limited knowledge of details] if and how I want to prepare them for the upcoming browser changes.

• Do I leave my above solution in place and do nothing? In doing so I have to hope that IE8 will be good enough to not get IE7 hacks but act like Gecko or WebKit — that or reside myself to expecting that some adjustments will have to be made once IE8 lands.
• Do I prematurely start to include the like-IE7 meta tag so that I don’t have to revisit the site later and just let the site live forever as IE7 compatible? Is it realistic to expect that this will still work, and there will not be any testing when IE8 hits required, and that things will work flawlessly without going through the same motions that should happen with any new browser release?
• Does it make a difference if I think the site will have regular staffing and updates or if its just a site build to get something published and nobody manages it again until the next redesign in a year or two?

Reasonable approaches all — I may flip flop some while I decide what I think works best and see what others are doing. However, they’re also solutions for the extreme near term. Looking further out the answers and options start getting fuzzier.

After IE8 hits

Shortly after IE8 hits web developers will have to switch from asking themselves how to code for the unknown, isntead having to code for the new known. It is easy to anticipate that a requirement for any new site in this time will be to cover exsiting compatibility [IE6 & IE7] and extend to the new kid on the block. So how might we do that with all these rendering modes floating around? At the pace standards move along, as well as the need to avoid total screwy quirks mode in the older browsers lets presume we’ll need to stick to the same languages that we’re using currently [for some time at least]. So to revisit my current model of structuring code for compatibility’s sake out 2 or 3 years what would that look like?

• Do we continue to play in IE7-standards-mode, coding down for IE6 and hope IE8 needs no adjustments and get nothing out of the IE8 progress?
• Do we use no compatibility flag and presume IE7 compatibility mode and then code up or down as needed and cross our fingers?
• Do we use the use the IE8 compatibility flag and code down to both IE6 and IE7?

What about JavaScript?

One thing we, as web developers, haven’t had to deal much with — ok, I lie, we’ve had to deal a lot with — but anyway, IE8 promises to have some large javascript feature changes and it has been cited [or presumed] that this as a big reason about why the separate “mode” is needed. Though I welcome the progress on the scripting front, the “rendering modes” is not an angle that has yet impacted JavaScript code. What real impact if any will the same browser and version changing javascript behavior based on mode have on our existing or future sites? Will it have any impact at all? Is the last option for browser version management feasible if the JS changes are indeed drastic?

We may not know how to answer this until some concrete information on JavaScript changes in IE8 is posted, or even still not until we see a public beta build released to the public. That said, I’m not sure the question, nor the answers are premature if we’re being asked now to evaluate and embrace the proposal.

Thoughts?

In a roundabout way I’m trying to both air, but also think through, my concern that the middle term outlook [2-3 years, or as long as XHTML 1.0, IE6 and IE7 all live] the additional rendering mode of IE8 and mode switching mechanics will keep developers in a “think like its IE7” mindset and not take real advantage of IE8 because of the difficulty of mixing the IE8 benefits with something that would work reasonably well in IE7.

I think its great to have a handle on the short term solutions, and its certainly enjoyable to envision a future with HTML5, CSS3, SVG, Canvas, DOM3, XML, XSL, and whatever other standards may be in the works. But should I be concerned that we’re setting ourselves up for a /worse/ middle term outlook then we would be if we kept on as we have been? Am I way off base with these concerns? Have I totally missed the point or the timeline?

Are there potential solutions or coding practices I haven’t thought of?

Through ALA and the IEBlog comes a proposal for a new mechanic of handling the backwards compatibility of web sites — pushing the familiar DOCTYPE Switch aside and going with a new mechanism of declaring target browser versions via meta tag.

• Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 by Aaron Gustafson at A List Apart
• From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey by Eric Meyer at A List Apart
• Compatibility and IE8 by Chris Wilson at the IEBlog
• Opting-in to standards support and Microsoft’s Version Targeting Proposal at the WaSP

The perfect solution or the last sign of the web standards apocalypse? If you’ve got an opinion let it be heard.

Molly recently lamented that twitter has sucked the blogging out of her. I’ve been feeling the same way for some time, though I was never as prolific a writer has she is. Though for me I think it was Web 2.0 that has sucked the blogging out of me, and unfortunately the slow down isn’t all that recent.

Bookmarks hidden in one service, interesting news stories in another, photos and other content in yet another. I tried to remedy that with the creation of a tumblelog-like Place Name Where but I never did get it integrated into this site beyond tag searches and so it never felt like part of any discussion that might take place here.

So where to next? The basic tumblelog format doesn’t appeal to me, nor does simply putting a bunch of widgets on page or daily “this is what I bookmarked today” posts along side of any blog content. That kind of leaves most existing solutions behind. I’m not quite sure what form this site will end up in when I’m done or what purpose it will serve. But I do want to start playing again and posting more doodles or pieces of what I’m playing with for others to see.

In the mean time I also have a backlog of posts I’ve been meaning to write or finish writing, some even describing subtle features of the current design [open the site in a browser, not a feed reader and resize the width!]. I may revisit those ideas as a way to get some activity here again and get myself back into the habit of posting on web dev stuff.

Don’t miss these!

• Joe Hewitt releases a script for Firebug for iPhone
• jQuery 1.1.3 released
• Abe Fetting blogs some other iPhone scripting findings including keypress and drag&drop related events.

I’m reading John Resig’s Pro JavaScript Techniques and really digging it. Expect a review in the coming weeks.

I didn’t want to let today go by without a post acknowledging the 2nd birthday of Microformats.org and the related community.

Thought the first year was huge for microformats, the second one has seen additional growth in all areas from format maturity, to huge growth in the community and sites using various markup constructs, to greater support from application vendors.

Here’s a recap of a few recent news items or tidbits incase you missed them.

• John Allsopp’s book on Microformats was published
• NetNewsWire 3.0 is supporting microformats thus avoiding the need for one of my earlier hacks
• Other applications like Firefox are promising support in future releases
• Sites keep adopting various formats — from new sites like Twitter [hCard, XFN & hAtom] to older standbys like LinkedIn with 9million+ hResume based profiles!

Drew McClellan has just posted The State of Textpattern over on his site. Drew is not a core TXP developer, but a long time user who has seen the product change and change hands over its life. His concerns are no surprise to me, as we’ve often gone back and forth over IM trying to ease each other’s frustration with the state of the project.

I think Drew has covered most of my frustrations in his State of Textpattern address. I’ve been using it since the Place Name Here redesign in late 2004, and evaluated it for other projects before and used it since. In that time there are some enhancements to the sites I’ve done via other’s plugins, plugins written myself after I’ve seen a need, times when I’ve done things simply to participate in the community and make it look like it had some life [like the theme contest and been in the code enough to know how it works and make a fair amount of my own customizations.

But as time has passed, like Drew, I find myself both concerned and hesitant about continuing to contribute in any way, or keeping it in future plans for my own sites.

I don’t use the product in my typical day to day web development duties [projects are bigger, using other often custom frameworks or languages besides PHP] but I occasionally find myself with time outside of work that I could offer to the project if the motivation was there.

When motivation and time align – the occasional contributor

The times in the past when both motivation and time have aligned and I’ve made contributions like the microformat plugin. The times more recently when that has been the case, were time and motivation to revise my plugins or look for other things to enhance [hAtom templates or OpenID as examples], I haven’t had enough confidence in the project to justify the effort. “Big” changes that have been talked about forever like admin side redesigning or the decision to include [or not] a particular JS library would have a big impact on how I should approach my code and what features I think are a priority. With no development roadmap in sight [again not a timeline, just a commitment to features or general development direction] and no assurances that what has been done in the so called experimental branch will be there next week I find it impossible to plan my own contributions.

And that’s my own biggest area of frustration for the last few months. My investment in any particular product on my own blogs is light. I could jump to WP or EE or some other solution in a weekend and be done with TXP and onto plotting how to address my peeves with the new platform. The investment in a product that others might be downloading and using is a bit more difficult for me to abandon.

The wrong things take work

As much as the direction [or lack there of] is a concern, its only the latest symptom of a something that has always plagued textpattern.

The way product development has been handled since it was opened up to a larger, more open team, has always been difficult to follow. It is a chore to cover the forums, blogs and mailing lists on a regular basis. That their use by the core team go in spurts and ultimately most of the insight into the product comes in the form of replies to inquiries on the forums or individual code checkins only makes it more difficult. Unless it is your job to do so and you’re building sites with TXP on a day to day basis, the commitment that needs to be made before one can just jump in and be a productive contributor has been too great.

Its nice that a core team has formed over time and they’re now looking for ways to sustain themselves, but I agree 100% that its the the lack of open direction, and the occational feeling from some contributors that direction doesn’t need to be or is somehow in a state of development where it cannot be stated that has me concerned and questioning continued use and support of textpattern.

Bulletproof Ajax is a newly released book from New Riders and author [and fellow WaSP member] Jeremy Keith. Devoted to teaching the proper way to design for and use the technologies behind everyone’s current favorite buzzword. If you’re looking for a step by step guide on how to recreate your companies Flash application click for click this probably isn’t going to help too much (other then perhaps help push you into the direction of rethinking your approach, or just going back to your old friend), but instead it does a wonderful job of breaking down the systems that make Ajax work and putting them in context — that being a new dynamic way of enhancing, interacting with and manipulating web documents.

Tomorrow, April 5th, we will see the return of CSS Naked Day a novel idea where participating sites will remove all styling information in an effort to promote standards, get a little self promotion, and have a little fun. My take, reposted from the discussion at webstandards.org, is below. I said a bit more about it last year in I’m Not Naked, most of which still applies.

It’s meant to illustrate the importance of CSS and graceful degradation.

My interpretation on it is that it is meant to illustrate the importance of good HTML and markup practices as much as anything else — that CSS is great, but it should overshadow it all. Or maybe that’s just my own philosophy bleeding through. I surely would have called it “Naked HTML day” had I thought the idea up, and explicitly included scripting in the ’stripped’ category.

Let us also be clear, the group of participants in this event are self selecting, that is no one is forcing a site to remove their CSS [and perhaps other features such as JS that may manipulate style information]. Therefore I don’t see some of the objections to the promotion holding much water, or at least are made up of valid but misdirected concerns.

The maintainers and stakeholders of the sites participating shouldn’t do so lightly, but probably are not, and I would also suspect they aren’t doing so without considering all of the problems involved. And for the rare few that are participating for other motives [e.g. publicity alone] perhaps seeing their work in the unstyled state will lead to improvements.

And for the record, neither of my personal sites will be involved again this year. For most other sites I work on the group of stake holders is far too large to get a change like this through for what is primarily a social or quasi-political statement with little concrete benefits. But that’s the corporate world for you.

Quickies! Don’t miss these.

Ethan Marcotte just posted his slides from his presentation today at An Event Apart Boston. Grab them from this post. He’s been busy, also writing Where Our Standards Went Wrong for A List Apart.

And John Allsopp wraps up links to microformat presentations given around the world by Tantek Çelik, Dmitry Baranovski and himself over at Microformatique. John too has been busy, his new book, Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 was released this week.

I’ve just updated my microformat plugin for the textpattern CMS and blogging tool. This update is a maintenance fix to add support for Textpattern v1.0.4 and some changes made in the way tag helpers are built. Users of older versions of TXP should stick with the 1.0 version of the plugin.

Future updates to the plugin are planned to add additional microformats support, expand the flexibility of the tag helpers and to streamline the underlying PHP code. If you’re using this plugin — or have chosen not to — please help by posting a comment letting me know how well you think it fits into your writing style.

Oops. Looks like I brushed aside the browser report updates around here last month. That’s OK, cause its all up to date now — both here and here. Like most months I’ve had to update the script I use just a bit to account for new user agents that come up this time with a few more bots trying to spoof Firefox, and a few new sightings in the “fun” category:

• Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en)
• Mozilla/5.0 (PLAYSTATION 3; 1.00)

[Wondering if that means I get to write off my Wii as a business expense?]

Interrupting the dearth of posts to bring you this important announcement… 24 Ways is back this year with a round of daily web development related articles. So far we’ve got a few great pieces, with a mix of immediately useful information and some things to look forward to.

• Day 5 brings Accessible Dynamic Links by Mike Davies covers a few different ways to enhance the links around your site.
• Rachel Andrew contributed Day 2 with the simple but powerful Faster Development with CSS Constants
• And as a look into what is coming up in the future (or present for Safari users) of CSS Andy Budd wrote Rounded Corner Boxes the CSS3 Way

And don’t overlook the comments, which can be as interesting as the pieces themselves.

Andy Clarke has posted a quick write up of his approach to browser testing new site designs. Though a bit of a simplification, he follows a line that looks similar to:

1. Gecko
2. Safari
3. IE 7
4. Opera
5. IE 6

And then trails in with testing the stragglers at various degrees based on spec, but always for at least access to content. I don’t have too much to add to that other then I agree. When I’m coding I will typically be working on my mac with Camino open (it always is), Firefox (for the DOM Inspector + JS console) and Safari. When the page is stable in those I will turn to IE/Win (flipping between 6 or 7, depending on which box I’ve got easiest access to) and then work out from that base. The only real difference in our approach is that more often then not I still give IE5/Mac style information.

I’ve gushed here numerous times about the Mozilla / Firefox DOM Inspector tool and how the insights it provides into the way the page is parsed and rendered by Gecko are indispensable when building a web site. What I haven’t spent nearly enough time doing is gushing about similar tools in other browsers—specifically Internet Explorer and Safari.

Safari Web Inspector

Safari, err, WebKit nightly builds have had a DOM Inspector tool of their own since January, Web Inspector, announced in this post. The tool really holds up well to its older counterpart listing node information, all individual and combined style rules, highlighting the active element in the browser window and more. It also has some interesting new features—two shown here—identifying what style properties have been ignored or overridden by another rule and a ‘metrics’ view which shows the box, padding and margin dimensions of any given element.

The only feature I find that I miss from the other tool is the ability to change CSS properties on the fly, but its an easy one to work around.

IE Developer Toolbar

What did I do before this thing? Seriously.

Its kind of a mix between toolbar and inspector with common items like outlines and validation tools, but the key feature is certainly the ‘View DOM’ window. Again, the features are in line with the other available tools, you can walk the DOM tree, inspect properties, change attributes of individual nodes and see important information like ‘hasLayout’ values right along side the CSS properties. But there seems to be one big missing piece that I find getting caught up on regularly when working on complex sites—no view of individual CSS rules, only combined rules—this can make trying to trace values through different style sheets (and sometimes IE only ones) still a bit hit or miss on complex sites.

Don’t let that prevent you from installing it, even without that key-to-me feature it still is a tool that has saved me countless hours since I’ve installed it. You can grab the IE Developer Toolbar here for IE6 and IE7 and read up on it here.