Podcast #2, SXSW, Ninja Articles

Open Web Podcast #2

The second edition of the Open Web Podcast is now live. In this episode we brought on Brendan Eich and Arun Ranganathan (both of Mozilla) to discuss the recent changes that occurred in the ECMAScript 3.1/ECMAScript 4 processes that resulted in ECMAScript Harmony. This is a dense podcast - going just over [...]

7 Comments · Posted: August 15th, 2008 · Tags: book, podcast, sxsw

Object.getPrototypeOf

Historically one JavaScript property that's seen a lot of use (mostly due to its convenience) is that of __proto__. It's a quick-and-dirty way of accessing the original prototype property of the object's constructor function. For example, the following is true:

[js]"test".__proto__ === String.prototype

// Another alternative, not using __proto__
// Only works when constructor isn't changed
"test".constructor.prototype === String.prototype[/js]

This [...]

17 Comments · Posted: August 14th, 2008 · Tags: ecmascript, mozilla, javascript

ECMAScript Harmony

There's been some turmoil in the world of ECMAScript.

While many are - even, at least, vaguely - familiar with the development of ECMAScript 4 the devil is in the details. I've blogged about ES4 extensively in the past - and even did a speaking tour last fall educating developers about its details and implementations, however, [...]

49 Comments · Posted: August 13th, 2008 · Tags: ecmascript

border-image in Firefox

For the upcoming Firefox 3.1 release a lot of work has been going into improving its CSS support (specifically, in relation to the CSS 3 specification).

One areas that have received solid implementations is that of border-image. This is a new CSS 3 module that makes the exact slicing of images (and their positioning around an [...]

14 Comments · Posted: August 13th, 2008 · Tags: mozilla, css3, css, firefox

Tracking Firebug Performance

Firebug 1.2 final is set to be released sometime within the next week or two which means that our goals for Firebug 1.3 need to be pretty clear at this point. Last week the Firebug Working Group convened at Google to discuss the goals for the upcoming release. In taking a step back and looking [...]

14 Comments · Posted: August 12th, 2008 · Tags: firebug, mozilla

Open Web Podcast #1

Decided to start something new with Dion Almaer (of Ajaxian.com fame) and Alex Russell (Dojo frame) - a podcast! We talk about the "Open Web" (the topics break down in to standards, development, JavaScript, tools - all sorts of things). We're working to get it up on iTunes (I'll be sure to update when it [...]

10 Comments · Posted: August 9th, 2008 · Tags: html5, whatwg, w3c, podcast

DOM DocumentFragments

I was playing around with DOM DocumentFragments recently, in JavaScript, seeing what I could make with them. Roughly speaking, a DocumentFragment is a lightweight container that can hold DOM nodes. It's part of the DOM 1 specification and is supported in all modern browsers (it was added to Internet Explorer in version 6).

In reading up [...]

48 Comments · Posted: July 21st, 2008 · Tags: javascript, dom

Firebuggin'

I've got a mini-announcement. Starting this week about half of my time at Mozilla is going to be spent driving the direction of the brand-new Mozilla Firebug team. I'm, understandably, quite excited about this proposition. Like all web developers I've found Firebug to be an invaluable tool for web development.

We have a great team forming [...]

72 Comments · Posted: July 17th, 2008 · Tags: firebug, firefox, mozilla