One of the things which has been taking up my time from releasing Drawing Board is that I’ve been writing another guest edition of my friend David Mertz’s XML Matters column for IBM developerWorks. The latest, SVG and the Scriptless Script went live yesterday.  Read →

Awhile back I promised a bunch of posts, but delays were made (including a month of vacation travelling around BC which I won’t apologize for). One of the promised projects I was going to talk about was PySight, which ought to be simple, since it’s just a trivial wrapper around Tim Omernick’s CocoaSequenceGrabber (used with his permission). But I wanted to package it nicely, write more example code, maybe some documentation.  Read →

While most of my coding for fun is in Python, a whole lot of my coding at work is in Javascript. Over the years I have tried many, many frameworks for extending Javascript to add new widgets to the browser, to handle functional-style programming in Javascript, or simply to make the browser DOM easier to use. They pretty much all suck. Much of the suckitude comes from trying to support beasts such as Netscape 4 or IE Mac, neither of which are supported by any sane company these days. Of course, now that Netscape 4 is finally settling into the dim recesses of history where it belongs, we still have all the flavours of IE to plague us. Microsoft does their best work when they are playing catch-up. Everyone predicted that as soon as they were the dominant browser they would stop caring about standards and stop updating their browser in any significant way. Microsoft denied it, but can anyone really say they’re surprised that it’s exactly what they did? Only when Firefox began to seriously erode their “market share” did they reanimate the moribund IE team. I can’t wait to see what kind of nightmares we get when that monster walks out of the laboratory.  Read →