This week, Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street posted about unique IDs in web applications. I read this and thought, “you’re right, they should be unique, but what if you’ve got an AJAX repeater?” By this I mean when I’m loading functional parts of my application that I’ll be referencing with JavaScript again, do I have to maintain a unique ID? Surely it knows what I added last or how to make them into an array?
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Posts Tagged ‘JavaScript’
Patching iUI
Monday, September 22nd, 2008Recently, I’ve been working on an iPhone web app for my employer (internal, so I can’t share). I based the design and architecture around the iUI library by Joel Hewitt, which became an overnight de-facto standard for web apps. However, after a lot of playing with it and turning it inside out, I’ve found there are a number of problems which have not yet been fixed.
For example; I want to run an AJAX search on a page one menu down my site tree. I found that this wasn’t possible as subsequent javascript code was not evaluated by Safari. There’s other things too, like any iPhone/iPod application link not working, having to press any link that goes to “_self” twice and having a slide animation that stutters more than a broken record.
I am happy to say that fixes exist for all but the last item, and I have put them all into a javascript file, which can be found at the end of this post.
However, I do not believe that this is the solution to iUI’s problems. I feel that a complete re-write in a standardised library like jQuery is the solution. Who knows, I may even find time to write it 
So, here’s the file: iui.patched.js
Steve
Browser Wars: The SlickSpeed Test
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
With the impending release of Firefox 3, a new chapter to “browser wars” is upon us. In this short series, I’ll be looking at what each browser offers to a user, and hopefully pick a champion.
The first battleground is JavaScript. In the late 1990s, JavaScript was shunned by many web developers because of browser incompatabilities, bugs and that it wasn’t very useful for things other than fancy clock (which flash is better at anyway). Since the rise of the XmlHttpRequest, JavaScript has become a way to enhance a website and provide new ways of interacting with the users. Combine this with JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, mooTools, Prototype and DoJo, JavaScript has had a renaissance of biblical proportions. With the Web Standards Project releasing Acid 3 as a JavaScript test, the JavaScript comeback has been set high standards of compliance in the same way that Acid 2 did for CSS (more…)