API: map & grep
map and grep are two utilities that are extremely useful if you know how to use them, but more often that not, I see more convoluted code written to achieve the effect of these functions.
Historically, I believe that John Resig was inspired by the Perl functions of the same name – which are basic building blocks of the Perl programming language. Let’s look at how you can use these functions.
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Mozilla Sets Standards for A 3D Web
Mozilla has joined forces with Khronos to create what could be a new standard for the World Wide Web: 3D browser graphics.
The creator of Firefox has joined graphics consortium Khronos to bring a public 3D browser-based environment within a year. Mozilla’s standard will allow Javascript (the basis of many web applications) to tap directly into OpenGL (the basis of many 3D Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)). With Quake Live being released last month, many developers are looking towards pushing other games to be browser based, including MMO’s. "One of the things which puts people off virtual worlds(MMOs) is that it requires users to make very big downloads to install the games," said Paul Jackson, an analyst with research firm Forrester, "Having them available directly from a web browser would eliminate this and have much wider implications for non-gamers." In other words, you could be playing World of Warcraft at work without needing to have the full background engine, as the full graphical engine would be hidden within the browser. He continued: "If you think about the traditional browsing experience of flat pages and links this is not a natural way to interact. People are much more used to walking around and picking things up so a 3D browser could lead eventually to a more naturalistic way of interaction." In addition to it’s gaming applications, any 3D modelling system, such as medical, transport or Googlemaps could now be run directly from the browser. While this is an interesting idea in theory, it does sort of lead you to the image of searching through Wikipedia as being like trying to find the Lost Ark of the Covenant.
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Interview With Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer
Written by Richard MacManus
In my recent visit to Silicon Valley, I got the chance to visit the Mozilla headquarters. Among others at the organization, I spoke to Chris Beard – Mozilla’s Chief Innovation Officer and the person overseeing its efforts to bring new concepts to the browser, a.k.a. Mozilla Labs. We discussed where Firefox is heading and how it compares to Google Chrome in particular. We also talked about Mozilla’s new mobile browser Fennec, the add-on platform, and how recent innovations by Mozilla – such as Weave and Ubiquity – fit into the big picture. In this post we’ll focus on the near future of Firefox.
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Software giant claims that the world’s most popular web browser ia faster and safer than even before.
Microsoft will make the latest version of Internet Explorer, the world’s most popular web browser, available for download from 19 of March.
Microsoft claims that the Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is faster, more user-friendly and more secure than previous versions.
Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer of Microsoft, said: “With Internet Explorer 8, we are delivering a browser that gets people to the information they need, fast, and provides protection that no other browser can match.”
One of the key new features of IE8 is “Accelerators”, which allow surfers to perform common tasks, such as looking up an address on a map, without navigating first to a separate website. Web users can also keep an eye on their favourite sites by using “Web Slices”, which are stored in the redesigned favourites bar and flash when a site is updated.
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The Battle Of The Browsers – The History And The Future Of Internet Browsers
With Internet Explorer 8 now available, can Microsoft hope to retain market dominance over fierce open source rivals such as Mozilla’s Firefox or the feature packed Opera web browser. Can history give us a clue to what the future of web browsers/browsing might hold? How did Netscape Navigator go from having a dominant 89.36% market share of all web browsers in 1996 and yet only 3.76% by mid 1999?
Let us take a journey that will begin long before even the intellectual conception of Internet Explorer, that will glance at its long defeated rivals, examine the current browsers available and will end with a prediction of what the future of browsing will offer us – and which browser(s) will still be around to offer it.
People often think that Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser since the golden age of the internet began. Well for a very long time now it has indeed been the most popular browser and at times been almost totally unrivalled. This was mainly a result of it being packaged free with Microsoft Windows, in what some would later call a brutal monopolisation attempt by Microsoft. The last few years however have heralded the arrival of new, possibly superior browsers. Mozilla’s Firefox has been particularly successful at chipping away at Explorers market dominance. So where did it all begin, and why were Microsoft ever allowed to have a hundred percent market dominance?
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by Nicole Ferraro
A recent project of mine required me to do a quick review of the accessibility level of a site. Nothing serious, just to show what was possible to test and where the site scored right now. I managed to assemble a small list of tools that I believe did a rather good job. This article is a list of those tools, and some tips on how to use them.
First off, to do a real accessibility test, you need real people, with real tasks to accomplish. These are not tools to replace people. Instead, they can give you a quick rundown on where you stand, and find things you’ve missed. I like to compare it with HTML validation: Validation is a great way to find your errors, but just because you validate does not mean you have good code.
Oh, by the way, I limited this to only free tools. Thought you’d like that. Also, for your enjoyment, I’ve split this article into three parts :
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The web has really changed the way we do things. Remember those paper timetables? No need for them anymore, we simply type in our destination on a box and get a step by step guide for what to do. Finding recipies? No need to look through books any more, just type in a few ingredients on your favourite food site. The examples are countless but there is no time for us to sit back and relax just yet. The web can be improved. We can get more people to publish their stuff online, we can get better tools for finding relevant info, and we can make the information accessible to more people. In this article I’m going to talk a little about each of those three points.
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Internet Explorer 8
New Features To Slice, Store, And Accelerate Your Web Applications
Daron Yöndem
This article is based on a prerelease version of Internet Explorer 8. All information is subject to change.
In this article, I will look into the details of these features to see how Internet Explorer 8 can make life easier for both developers and users alike. You’ll see how these new features allow you to define portions of a page and control its update frequency and expiration, improve the user’s search and navigation experience, and lots more.
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In the fast changing and highly competitive web-based business environment, it is critical for organizations to test their web sites and web applications using an automated testing tool. Automated web testing should ensure that the web applications/web sites/web services usual functionality works correctly, provides the ability to reuse and extend the tests across multiple browsers/platforms/ languages/databases/servers and ensure that all the users accessing the web applications get results in an acceptable time.
Ultimately, web testing large or small Web applications/Web Sites requires some kind of expertise. Today, most of the organizations contact dedicated QA professionals, testing labs and testing consultants to get this done. Also, the need of the day is to do remote web testing instead of traveling to a particular site for teams who are geographically distributed. This helps to cut costs, minimize the effort required to test web applications/web sites, increase software quality, reduce time-to-market and use reusable test cases.
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Robin Williams
It is easy to make a dorky web page. It’s also easy to make a very nice, clean, professional-looking web page even if you don’t have much design experience. Often the difference, even for beginning designers, is simply a matter of eliminating certain features that are guaranteed to make a page look amateurish. Go through the list of things that people–designers and non-designers–from around the country have cited as the things that make the difference between a well-designed and a poorly designed web page.
Keep in mind that the point of eliminating bad features is not just to make the page prettier, but to communicate more effectively.
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