On Thursday my Windows XP computer died. This was not entirely unforeseen, since it had taken to crashing at random instances, and also when I wanted to restart it after a night of inactivity. But now it didn't want to start up at all, and reinstalling Windows XP brought on yet another crash. Time for a new computer.

This thrilling episode of "My glorious life as a web developer" has played havoc on my schedule, which was rather tight to begin with. The main victim turns out to be the addEvent() recoding contest.

continue reading

As we all know an xmlhttp script requires the use of the readystatechange event. In theory, using the load event is also possible, but Explorer doesn't support it on xmlhttp requests.

Both these events, and the readyState property, have a few odd quirks when used in an xmlhttp environment, though. These quirks don't impact standard xmlhttp scripts too much, but as soon as you want to use the event objects or readyStates other than 4 you need to know about them.

continue reading

Zoals ik een jaar geleden al zag aankomen, beginnen bedrijven serieuze behoefte te krijgen aan junior webontwikkelaars met gedegen CSS-kennis, en is het uitermate lastig die te vinden.

In de afgelopen week heb ik niet minder dan vijf aanvragen gekregen voor juniors die in vaste dienst willen treden of een freelance-klus van minimaal een maand willen aannemen. Helaas heb ik Nee moeten verkopen, omdat mijn netwerk op dit moment uitgeput is.

Vandaar dat ik met spoed op zoek ben naar mensen die CSS grondig onder de knie hebben, een eerste of tweede schrede willen zetten op een carrièrepad als professioneel webontwikkelaar, en die per direct beschikbaar zijn voor een vaste baan of een langdurige freelance-klus.

Herken je jezelf hierin, vul dan het formulier in en ik neem contact met je op.

Remember that the addEvent() recoding contest closes in three days. Thursday is your last chance to submit your script, since I'm going to close comments on my Friday morning and start working on the judging.

The new Firefox 1.5 (= Mozilla 1.8, as far as I understand) is the first one to support multi-column layouts. Of course I created a quick test page to study the effect.

In my continuing quest to understand XMLHTTP I gathered some very intriguing material that I'm quite sure will save somebody else's ass. Today I offer a closer look at the abort() method, as well as an as yet unexplained bug in Mozilla which causes the responseXML to go missing.

continue reading

My recent entry addEvent() considered harmful generated many interesting comments and technical pointers. It's clear that the original addEvent() function doesn't quite cut the cake any more, and it's equally clear that we badly need a function such as this to keep our scripts simple.

Hence I'd like to take the opportunity to launch an addEvent() recoding contest. Write your own version of addEvent() and removeEvent(), submit it by adding a comment to this page, and win JavaScript fame.

continue reading

In a recent article on the IE Blog, Justin Rodgers talks about further CSS improvements in the ever more impatiently awaited IE 7 beta 2. His message is that CSS hacks will start to break in IE 7, and I fully agree.

Nearly two years ago I warned against the excessive use of CSS hacks, because I envisioned a situation like this. Web developers who rely on CSS hacks are going to have serious problems.

continue reading

Apple just released Safari 1.3.1 without fuss. I found one important improvement over 1.3: the unload event, which was badly broken in 1.3, is now restored to its ancient reliability.

I didn't find any other significant updates in the CSS or JavaScript handling, but I did only a few very quick tests. If you found a change, please leave a comment.

Update: Safari used to download images with display: none only when they, or their parent element, were toggled to display: block. Unfortunately version 1.3.1 (and maybe 1.3) reverted to downloading the images anyway. Test page.

Currently I'm working on debugging a very complicated script that's supposed to xmlhttprequest a few pages to be shown in a "Dashboard". I already wrote about another aspect of the project in my previous entry, but now that I'm concentrating on the XMLHTTP aspects of this project I found out a few very interesting things about responseXML, as well as a complicated Explorer bug.

This entry treats these two points, since they should be documented.

continue reading