One's sentiment toward JavaScript flips betweenelegance and disgust without transitingintermediate states.The key to seeing JavaScript as elegant is understandingits warts, and knowing how to avoid, work around or even exploit them.I adopted this avoid/fix/exploit approach after readingDoug Crockford'sJavaScript: The Good Parts:Doug has a slightly different and more elaborate take on the bad partsand awful parts,so I'm sharing my perspective on the four issues that have caused me the most griefin the past:how to fix broken block scope with with;the four (not three!) meanings of this;promoting ...

“Techmeme has redesigned,” Gabe Rivera founder of the popular technology news site wrote in January 2012. “Drudge Report is now indisputably the web’s ugliest news site.”I use Techmeme all the time. I find it an excellent news website. It’s a collection of well-selected links to important issues in the technology industry. It doesn’t look pretty but it works fine for me. Asides from the quality of its stories it also has black text on white background and a fairly large size, legible font. Gabe Rivera claims that Drudge Report is “the webâ€...

The ECMA committee is working hard on designing the next version of JavaScript, also known as "Harmony". It is due by the end of next year and it is going to be the most comprehensive upgrade in the history of this language. Chrome and V8 are committed to pushing JavaScript forward and have already started implementing the new features. You can try some of them today in the latest dev channel release. Here’s a summary: Lexical scoping. Now "let" is the new "var" – traditional "var" declarations are complemented with "let" and "const". Both are properly block-scoped bindings, elimi...

I recently started working on a few Node.js applications. Coming most recently from PHP (and Drupal in particular), I found the transition to Node.js to be surprisingly easy. Pleasurable, in fact. But I had to learn to think differently about a few things.Below I list the five things I think every PHP developer should know about Node.js.1. Node.js Is Built On Chrome's JavaScript EngineGoogle's browser, Chrome, has a notoriously fast JavaScript engine called V8. And this JavaScript engine can be cleanly separated from the web browser. Node.js is built on V8. This is one of the main reasons why ...

IntroductionWhy a re-introduction? Because JavaScript has a reasonable claim to being the world's most misunderstood programming language. While often derided as a toy, beneath its deceptive simplicity lie some powerful language features. 2005 saw the launch of a number of high-profile JavaScript applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web developer.It's useful to start with an idea of the language's history. JavaScript was created in 1995 by Brendan Eich, an engineer at Netscape, and first released with Netscape 2 early in 1996. It was orig...

Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design “My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality”  â€“ Dieter RamsSince I got to know the work of Dieter Rams back in college, I became fascinated by the exceptional pro...

The HTML5 Microzone is presented by DZone and Microsoft to bring you the most interesting and relevant content on emerging web standards.  Experience all that the HTML5 Microzone has to offer on our homepage and check out the cutting edge web development tutorials on Script Junkie, Build My Pinned Site, and the HTML5 DevCenter. A friend of mine alerted me this weekend to just how much I have a weird fascination with Venn diagrams. I decided to roll with it. So yeah, I have an irrational love of Venn diagrams. But that begs the question, can I make a Venn diagram with just...

So let's say you're an awesome web developer making an awesome web app. One day, you add a link in the web app that has an event handler instead of an href. Testing it, you realize that your cursor doesn't change when hovering over it, unlike a normal link. You think for a minute and then give it a cursor:pointer style, which fixes the issue. You are happy.The next day, QA informs you that the link cannot be tabbed to. Confused, you do some research and find a solution to the problem: Simply set the tabindex attribute to 0, which correctly adds the link into the tab flow. You are annoyed by th...