Web Resources He Uses

“Ethan” has a really nicely packaged set of web resources that he uses.

From JavaScript core libraries, to widgets, to tools, to CSS frameworks, to CSS techniques, to browser compatibility, to typography, to extensions, and much much more. Nicely done.

Sexy Page Curls

thought that sexy curls were not related to technology, but Elliott Kember packaged a nice and easy page curl plugin using jQuery.

<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
    $( '#target' ).fold();
});
</script>

How global is your JavaScript?

Mats Bryntse “had an idea about checking the most popular javascript frameworks & APIs to see how they differ in terms of global namespace pollution. This page loads all the frameworks separately in an iframe and compares the window object against the one of a fresh iframe. I also included information about which builtin JavaScript classes have been augmented, not sure how that would be useful but it shows a difference in architectural approach between the frameworks. You can click a row to see the details about the global symbols in the framework/API.

The results vary more than I’d expected and it’s interesting to see the different namespacing strategies at play. YUI/Jquery/Ext keep the numbers down by putting everything in one global object. It seems like Microsoft is using their own kind of namespacing using the $ sign as a namespace delimiter rather than using real object properties as the rest of the frameworks do.”

You can check this out via his checker page. An interesting read and you can narrow in on APIs of your choice.

We like to talk about how evil global variables are, but I wonder if we take this a touch too seriously sometimes. Sure there can be collisions and the like, but a lot of projects are doing just fine :)

Test Pilot: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to do real usability studies?

How many tabs does an average use at a time? How about novice users? How often is the stop button pressed? How many times do people open a new tab to perform a search?

There are hundreds of questions like these whose answers would help quantitatively inform the design process of Firefox.

Those are the questions that Aza Raskin and the Mozilla Labs team are working on solving with Test Pilot, a very exciting project that is kicking off in force.

I am jazzed to see where this goes. I would love to see the crowd show us that “wow, people really do that?” which is my constant experience from usability studies. Maybe we could get some performance info too, and learn from the crowd that plugin A + plugin B causes issues. Who knows. The platform it just beginning. Have ideas? “Come brainstorm at a Lab’s Night, participate in the forums, hop on IRC, or help create on our wiki.”