You can check it out via his Ubiquity documentation example that shows you side by side documentation with the actual source code itself. This context is terrific. He does this all dynamically, and uses border padding to align the documentation with the code itself.
Here is what he has to say about how it is done:
The raw source code for the file being documented above just has chunks of comments that are marked-up in WikiCreole; when the parser runs into such a chunk, it renders it alongside the code it annotates using Ivan Fomichev and Chris Purcell’s JavaScript Creole 1.0 Parser.
The idea of using the documentation to annotate the code—or the code to annotate the documentation, depending on how you look at it—was inspired in part by some of the typography presented in Ellen Lupton’s excellent Thinking with Type, which I recommend to anyone interested in the field.
It’s nice not having a separate documentation build step: aside from making the process of writing and editing documentation quicker, it also lowers the barrier for entry to contributors since they don’t need to setup a toolchain. It also means that we get versioned documentation in every commit for free.
Right now there isn’t much else to the system; the only other feature I added is the auto-generation of quasimodal popup menus that link the names of XPCOM interfaces to their entries on XUL Planet and MDC. It’d be nice to have more features like this; other niceties would be an automatically-generated table of contents, JavaScript Doctests, search functionality, cross references to other code, and even the ability to fix code formatting errors in-page. For now, though, I need to focus on actually using this tool to document more code.
As soon as Ben and I saw this our minds started to race. What if you could navigate the code via hyperlinks too? Or have groups comment inline? Many exciting ideas.
It is fun to see the 80 character column limit in place (and seeing where that is ignored). 80 character limits with wide screen displays? I never get that :)
Scott Robbin (Songza co-founder) has created a very cool jQuery plugin for pageSlide, an interaction based off of Aza's prototypes for Firefox Mobile and Ubiquity mouse gestures. The plugin wraps body content into a container and shifts it off of the page whenever a click event is fired, revealing a secondary interaction pane.
This plugin allows any developer to recreate a similar interaction on their own website using a few simple lines of Javascript. By attaching the method to an anchor tag, pageSlide wraps the original body content into a wrapper and creates an additional block for the secondary content load. The slide is animated whenever the click event is invoked.
No more browser testing: For example, no more if ( jQuery.browser.msie && !jQuery.isXMLDoc(this) ) { which is replaced with if ( !jQuery.support.noCloneEvent && !jQuery.isXMLDoc(this) ) {
Live event delegration: Reglib's claim to fame was how event delegation was "live" meaning that if you added elements later on, they would also fall into the same delegations. With $("#foo > div").live("click", someFn); you get the same in jQuery
$(this).closest("div");: Returns this or closest ancestor that matches selector
.offset() rewrite - significantly faster, uses no browser sniffing.
Adrien Friggeri has taken the music player ui and spent some time to create a really nice gestures library that allows you to add mouse gestures to a web page, supports complex (i.e. sequences of) gestures and provides visual feedback through the use of a canvas element.
Eric Wahlforss, the founder of SoundCloud, wrote in to tell us about "The Cloud Player", a iTunes / Songbird clone written entirely in Ajax:
we just released an open-source itunes-clone built in jquery (and app engine, soundmanager 2, soundcloud api), complete with smart playlists, drag'n'drop, keyboard shortcuts, load-as-you-scroll playlists, playlist sharing, waveform display of tracks, etc. we've extended jquery ui a bit for this to happen.
It's using soundcloud.com as the primary music source, and the SoundCloud JSONP API to access the track metadata, available at http://soundcloud.com/api.
I like how it shows the waveform of the entire track at the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, it's limited to the rather tiny music selection on soundcloud's service, but since it's open-source, the future is interesting indeed.
alert('Images loaded so far: ' + $('img:loaded').size());
This code is one example of how you can extend the selector experience in jQuery with simple JavaScript code.
James Padolsey takes us through this in a lot of detail, showing other examples including a simple "if the element is inline" selector, as well as well as tying into jQuery's "data" functionality.
I started creating an operating system like user interface in JavaScript. I had intended to use it for the admin sections of my content management system(that runs this website), but through developing it I started to question it's usability and decided to discontinue development.
Features in it's current state:
Start Button
Task Bar - view open windows and set focus/minimize
Windows (Create, move, maximize, minimize, resize, etc.)
Show Desktop on right click
Properties (Theme Color, Text Color, Background Color, Background Image)
Properties saved in cookies for next visit
Still don't know how to create a new window other than a Google one, and I am never quite sure when people will use these (even fully baked). I am sure it will happen, but not until the browser platform has gotten to a point where it actually can. Calling this an "OS" is funny too ;)
Voting has started in Dojo land to take in John Resig's Sizzle next-gem CSS selector engine.
This is incredibly exciting, as it shows how Ajax libraries are working together more and more. Instead of reinventing the wheel in different ways for each project, is it possible to find some core pieces that can be nicely shared? Of course, if our world was nicer and we could share code by linking in a nice way maybe this would happen more.
As I mentioned in my thanksgiving note, the work that the Ajax library developers do is hugely important and impactful, and having them work together can only be great news.
Take a look at this public email to the Dojo Foundation on the vote:
Overview
The Sizzle project is a JavaScript library for performing selections
across a DOM tree using CSS selectors. The library is designed to be
standalone (have no external dependencies), lightweight, fast, and
extensible. This culminates in a library that is perfectly suited for
integration into other libraries. While it's feasible that a developer
may use Sizzle directly the target audience for it is other library
authors.
All of the code for the project has been written by John Resig and is
released under an MIT license. There are some patches pending from
some other contributors (namely Prototype).
Right now the following libraries are adopting or are looking to adopt
Sizzle as their primary CSS selector engine:
It's likely that Sizzle will become the unified engine behind a
majority of the JavaScript libraries on the market (if not in numbers
then certainly in market share).
The project is owned by John Resig who will serve as BDFL/Project lead
if the project is accepted. There is no formal voting process, as of
yet, but it's likely that one will come about, considering the number of
projects using the codebase.
If the project is accepted to the foundation then all contributors to
the project will be required to have a CLA and follow the policies of
the Dojo foundation.
It's very likely that Sizzle will eventually expand into other areas
of JavaScript libraries (such as DOM manipulation and event binding).
That last line excites me too! It is interesting to see this happen in the Dojo Foundation. Remember, Dojo was founded out of toolkits coming together to aggregate forces. Kudos to everyone involved, and good luck!
Most everyone knows that Google has really stepped up to the plate by helping many JavaScript library projects host their builds on the Google AJAX Libraries API. Apart from providing a central distribution point for these libraries, the bandwidth cost savings alone go a long way in helping frameworks service their users in a sustainable manner.
Thanks to Vadim Spivak at Google and Dion Almaer (now at Mozilla) for helping to make this additional option available to the YUI developer community. We love that Google is supporting web developers in this way — grabbing YUI files from Google’s global infrastructure is a fantastic option to have.
This is great news for YUI developers who now have a choice of linking directly to YUI via yui.yahooapis.com and ajax.googleapis.com. YUI team lead, Eric Miraglia, has a great write-up on the YUI blog about this and goes into detail on how the framework's users can take advantage of this new hosting option.
jQuery and Amazon CloudFront
With nearly 2.5 million requests per day to the jQuery website, the jQuery project team is constantly on the look out for ways to decrease hosting costs while still managing the growing number of requests for the site's resources. Originally leveraging Amazon S3 for many of their static pages, the project has now turned to Amazon's new CloudFront CDN. The change has allowed for jQuery pages to be globally hosted as opposed to being centrally located in Amazon's Seattle-based S3 hosting center.
In tests, John Resig, team lead for the jQuery project, noticed substantial performance gains based on the switch:
I ran a similar test here in Boston and even managed to see a large improvement. I was seeing latency of anywhere from 50-200ms on Amazon S3, but only a latency of 17-19ms with CloudFront.
What does all of this mean? It means that the jQuery site is going to load even faster than it does now. We already receive some excellent hosting from Media Temple but being able to off-load these static files to the fast-loading servers will only make for a better browsing experience.
In less than 24 hours the project had received almost 2.5 million requests for over 50GB of data. The only drawback is an increase in bandwidth costs but still substantially less than that of a traditional hosting plan. The jQuery project makes use of the Google AJAX API as well and recommends it as choice for linking to the jQuery and jQuery UI libraries.
The hosting is free and what makes it unique to something like the Google CDN is that it allows Ext developers a central access point for their own custom builds.
We are pleased to announce that Ext has partnered with CacheFly, a global content network, to provide free CDN hosting for the Ext JS framework. Cachefly’s globally distributed network and aggressive caching accelerate the delivery of web content like JavaScript and CSS, making for an even faster Ext experience.
