Software As She’s Developed

On Demand Javascript – Scalecamp 2009View more presentations from mahemoff. These are the slides from my ScaleCamp presentation, covering various techniques for various styles of On-Demand Javascript, including Script Islands, “async” and “defer” attributes, and library support. One of the interesting things at ScaleCamp is that many of the folks there are dealing with third-party advertisers and [...]

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I only came across the MHTML image hack over the weekend, while listening to @jeresig on the new jQuery podcast (incidentally not the only

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I was recently invited to make a statement on WebMasterWorld about something in advanced Javascript at the edge of my understanding. I decided to cover fragment identifiers, something I have an odd obsession about: There’s a lot of cool stuff going on right now, standards-based graphics and sound foremost in my mind. But I’ll focus here [...]

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TechDirt discussion about web advertising. This reminds me of a recent Doc Searles article, Why Online Advertising Sucks and is a Bubble: It isn’t adveristing itself. It’s the way it’s too often done. I almost never click on an ad, for three reasons. First is that I almost never find what I’m looking for. Second is that [...]

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A lot of discussion around object-oriented Javascript involves finding cunning methods to get a super reference. This is sometimes a reference to the super class, the super instance, or the super version of the current method. The latest installment in an Ajaxian posting this week on work by Erik Arvidsson. It makes for an interesting [...]

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Working on a WordPress customisation recently, I added an "Edit This" link which only logged-in people can see. To get caching right, the server always outputs the same thing - an invisible link - and only in the browser does the decision get made to show the link or not. This exemplifies the pattern I [...]

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I just did some tinkering with offline sound and it turns out you can embed an audio clip in an HTML file, and play it without using Flash. I could have demo'd this in a raw HTML file, but it was just as easy to stick it in a Tiddlywiki file. So I made a [...]

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In the questions after my @media ajax talk, Simon Willison asked about frame busting. If gadgets sit inside iframes, what's to stop them from busting the frame, i.e. replacing the container with another website. I notice he made a similar comment when OpenSocial came out. If a gadget can cause iGoogle to go away in [...]

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A problem with the current opensocial gadget spec is that there's no relative path support. This means you end up hard-coding any references to Javascripts, CSS stylesheets, images, and services which are distributed along with your gadget. This is not good. For example, you may have a "prod" setup and a "dev" setup. While developing, you [...]

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This article explains iframe-to-iframe communication, when the iframes come from different domains. That you can do this effectively is only now becoming apparent to the community, and is now used in production by Google, Facebook, and others, and has powerful implications for the future of Ajax, mashups, and widgets/gadgets. I've been investigating the technique and [...]

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