Ook – And it should work…
Software Development
Another Javascript component, maybe?
Dynamic Select Boxes from Bobby van der Sluis – for when you have two select boxes that need to relate to each other. Neat idea, works nicely, and I think I have a use for it…
Played with Rico…
I had a play with Rico then. Pretty good, generally. Some neat effects, and I like the way they do rounded corners – clever. Doesn’t work too well with boxes that have outlines, but hey! Can’t have everything.
Also, I found a bug in the way their Drag and Drop functionality works. If you click a node in the DOM beneath the node that is draggable, you get a Javascript error. I emailed them with a fix for that.
My only complaint about this Library – I’d prefer to have it as a selection of different Libraries. It seems a shame to have to lump them all together for some small bits of user interface. For example, I’d be willing to have Drag and Drop that doesn’t neatly ‘slide’ back to it’s original position if not dropped on a Drop Zone. Having that in the UI means including LOTS of extra code. I pulled the Drag and Drop code out into a seperate file – I’ll publish it and the fix at some point soon.
Rounded corners
Here’s an interesting attribute in CSS I didn’t know about
-moz-border-radius
The style below is :
font-size: 12px; background-color: #ffffff; -moz-border-radius: 8px;
border: 2px solid #3366cc; padding: 7px;
A box with a border! Of course, this only works in Mozilla
Another box with a border!
Another fine plugin
Venkman Javascript Debugger – All sorts of useful things, like breakpoints and watches. I like it!
Rico, and more Ajax
Rico looks like a very promising library of Javascript. I’ve downloaded it, but not had a play yet.
An interesting validation technique
Encryption in Javascript. I’m sure I’ll think of a use eventually, but it just seems a neat idea to link with Ajax philosophy. I mean, with AES and the like, you can get the user to enter password, and there are uses for symmetric key algorithms.
Create a masked input control
An interesting technique
Here’s an interesting technique of drawing a user’s eye to an area on a page, by using a colour that fades after a couple of seconds. I know that it’s supposed to be for areas updated by the user (and I can think of at least one project for doing this), but it might work else where. I must give this a go, see what it’s actually like. It’s going to either be really good, or really bad…
(Update – having migrated my blog to WordPress, I find that it uses this technique. And it’s quite nice. It works well)
Working on Web UI Components
So, this whole ‘Ajax’ thing set me thinking – why not try to make all ‘normal’ user interface components – date, numeric, combo boxes, autosuggestion boxes, image rollovers, menus, tooltips, etc. – why not make them all into libraries that you can include in a page, and then configure through the attributes of a node. E.g.
<input name='someDate' type='text' value='' subtype='date'
format='yyyy-mm-ddd'>
Then the .js file you include reads inputs, finds dates, and add the functionality you need.
I’ve already done this for combo boxes – I’ll put it on my site soon – and so I started looking into menus, and found some neat things:
- Almost entirely CSS menus
- Windows ‘Start menu’ like lists, similar to above but with more javascript (would need to work out the image reloading issue this seems to have though!)
- More CSS dropdowns
- Suckerfish Drop-downs
I didn’t know you could do so much with CSS. Clearly, it has come along since I last really got stuck into it!
Quirksmode
Quirksmode is a neat little site describing various features and their support across browsers. This is important, in a world of non-standards compliant browsers. For example, I recently discovered in some code of mine that in an event, Opera 8 supports both ‘srcElement’ and ‘target’ properties. In fact, it seems to support both event models. I can see why, but this caused my code (where I set event.target = event.srcElement if event.srcElement existed) to blow up.
Oh, and it neatly describes a problem I found (and had to solve) yesterday with the ‘this’ keyword in event handlers in Internet Explorer. Wish I’d known this before.
Anyway, I like this site, and it is useful. 
Andy Burns' Blog 