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Ajaxian

Cleaning up the web with Ajax

This Week in HTML 5: Web Forms 2, Search, and moreToday

In Mark’s eighth roundup of HTML 5 land, he delves into the merging of Web Forms 2, which gives us fun things like:

• input type=”email”
• input type=”url”
• inpu type=”number”
• input type=”range”
• input type=”date”
• input type=”time”
• input type=”datetime”
• input type=”week”
• input type=”month”

Then Mark discusses input type=”search”:

Andy Lyttle wants to standardize one particular feature of <input type=”search”> (which is already supported by Safari, but

Maintainable JavaScript videos are now available.Yesterday

One month ago, the Fronteers conference in Amsterdam featured several “deep dive” talks on various web development topics. Stuart Langridge for example explained in detail what closures are and I talked about Maintainable JavaScript. The slides of my talk have been available for quite a while now and now Bachelor ICT have released the videos of the talk and an interview.

Here’s the first half of the talk on Vimeo:

Chris Heilmann: Maintainable JavaScript, part 1 from Bachelor-ict.nl on Vimeo.

And here’s the second:

Christian Heilmann: Maintainable JavaScript, part 2 from Bachelor-ict.nl on Vimeo.

Reinhardt: a Client-side Dispatch FrameworkYesterday

Kevin Dangoor of SitePen has introduced Reinhardt a dispatch engine on the client side:

A typical server-side web framework today includes three main components: a URL dispatching to some controller object scheme, a template engine, and a data mapping facility. Currently in Dojo, you’ll find that the latter two items already exist. dojox.dtl provides the first one, and dojo.data provides the second.

Given that Dojo already offers an implementation of the Django template engine, and that regular expression-based URL dispatch was a good fit for our problem at hand, I decided to base our URL dispatch on the model provided by Django.

You can see an example using the framework which uses these patterns:

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

1.  
2. var patterns = reinhardt.urldispatch.patterns("demo.code",
3.   [/^list\/(\d*)$/, "showMovieList", ["year"]],
4.   [/^search$/, "search"],
5.   [

IE8 and StandardsYesterday

Anne van Kesteren of Opera Software has updated his post on IE 8 to cover beta 2:

• XDomainRequest: Microsoft unfortunately continues with XDomainRequest rather than making changes to XMLHttpRequest as other browsers are doing and as is being standardized by the W3C Web Apps Working Group. (Disclaimer: I am the editor of XMLHttpRequest Level 2.)

  Some agreement was made to at least support the same protocol on the server, namely using the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header as per Access Control for Cross-Site Requests. (Disclaimer: I am the editor of that draft too.) However, IE8 only supports * as value for that header, not an origin, e.g. http://annevankesteren.nl (test). Sunava pointed out that was because the W3C WebApps WG was still debating the matter. Here is hoping they will fix the bug as there is agreement on that syntax.

• HTML5 DOM Storage: localStorage and sessionStorage are now supported. Enumerating through them does not give the results I was expecting (I got "length" and "remainingSpace" back as well, besides the keys) and they still have a remainingSpace member t

An Interesting Twist on a PastebinOctober 9

Pastebins have become an important part of sharing code with colleagues. Sites such as Pastebin & Pastie.org are extremely popular because they're easy to use and very effective in letting people compare notes on source code, especially in a support setting.

Remy Sharp wanted to take the pastebin concept a step further, past the static posting of code. His idea, which he tossed around for 6 months, finally came to fruition in the form of JS Bin, a new pastebin site with a twist:

JS Bin is a form of paste bin, but with a twist. It allows you to also include the HTML and CSS to provide context to your pasty. As such, it means you can actually run the JavaScript and pass this on to a colleague to help to debug.

This is a great idea as it lets you troubleshoot your code while seeing immediate results. The feature list is well thought out as well.

• Save private snippet
• Remote Ajax debugging
• Snippet URLs run entirely on their own (i.e. without the JS Bin framework around them)
• Support to quickly inject major JS libraries including jQuery, jQuery UI, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Dojo, MooTools & YUI
• Saves state within the open window (i.e. refresh and the code doesn't reset)

Th