Contents tagged with JavaScript
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JSON-style dictionary parameters in C#?
Eilon has an interesting post about using the new anonymous object initializer syntax in APIs that take dictionaries. The end result looks very much like the JSON parameterized function calls that are very common in many JavaScript frameworks, which shows once more how C# is getting many of the nice features of dynamic languages while remaining statically-typed. While I wouldn't use that just to get named parameters like those frameworks are often doing, it looks well-justified in this context because the parameter it's being used for is actually not predetermined.
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OpenAjax InteropFest 1.0: Microsoft's entry
Yesterday I got to write our entry in OpenAjax's InteropFest. The goal of this event is to demonstrate how different Ajax libraries can be parts of the OpenAjax ecosystem and interact with each other through the OpenAjax hub. The currently central feature of the hub is to expose a publish/subscribe message bus so that both producers and consumers of events can speak through a third party that is neutral to specific Ajax implementations.
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Should I use a type attribute on script tags?
I have immense respect for Douglas Crockford, but that doesn't mean I can't disagree with him... Douglas has written on a number of occasions that he prefers plain script tags, with no attributes. The argument goes like this:
"This script block uses the
languageattribute. This was a feature that was introduced by Microsoft in order to support VBScript. Netscape then adopted it to support its own nonstandard deviations. W3C did not adopt thelanguageattribute, favoring instead atypeattribute which takes a MIME type. Unfortunately, the MIME type was not standardized, so it is sometimes"text/javascript"or"application/ecmascript"or something else. Fortunately, all browsers will always choose JavaScript as the default programming language, so it is always best to simply write<script>. It is smallest, and it works on the most browsers." -
How to build a cross-browser history management system
When we built the history management feature in ASP.NET Futures, we spent considerable time experimenting with the different behaviors of the main browsers out there. The problem with such a feature is that it has to rely on a number of hacks because browser vendors basically never anticipated this need. Now they're thinking about it, so all this may be simplified in a few years, but in the meantime, it's a very complicated feature to build. One of the things that struck me was how little reliable literature is available on the subject. There is a lot of partial information, lots of false or unverified information, but very little that's really comprehensive, reliable and up to date. Good references I found include Brad Neuberg's Really Simple History and Handling Bookmarks and Back Button as well as Mike Stenhouse's Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for Ajax Applications. But it was a lot easier to just experiment directly on the different browsers and verify our theories directly.
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ScriptDoc 1.0 available
ScriptDoc is a tool that extracts documentation from JavaScript files and packages it into XML files that can be consumed by documentation building tools such as Sandcastle. The 1.0 version is now able to extract documentation from doc comments as well as from the structure of the code itself. It generates a documentation file that uses the same format as C# doc comment files and a reflection file that describes the structure of the object model and that follows the same schema that Sandcastle is using.
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IE6's main memory leak hot-fixed
I just learned through Ajaxian that IE6's main memory leak has been hot-fixed two weeks ago through Windows Update.
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Is Safari on Windows a good thing or a bad thing?
The first thing most web developers probably thought this morning when they learned about Safari for Windows was "oh man, yet another browser to test in". And yes, for the moment, that's what it amounts to. Coincidentally, I have spent a good part of last week making the history management in Microsoft Ajax work in Safari 2.0.4. I got it to work fine (after much Apple cursing), so the first thing I tried after I downloaded Safari 3 beta was my history tests. And sure enough, it breaks in new, unexpected ways. History management is pretty much a big hack that is different on about all browsers (Firefox and Opera are the nicest ones here, with predictible, similar behaviors). And sure enough, Safari 3 brings a totally unheard of model. I didn't find a way yet to create a new entry in history from script that doesn't navigate away from the page. None of the old Safari tricks work anymore (they were probably and rightfully considered bugs and were fixed). They weren't replaced by the more rational things that work in Firefox and Opera. Even the iFrame trick that we use on IE doesn't work because Safari now crashes if you try to dynamically add a frame to the DOM. If anybody here found a way to do that, I'd love to hear about it.
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Semicolon expected?
If you're seeing a lot of JavaScript errors on web sites today, more accurately on pages that have Google AdSense, well, you're not the only one:
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Microsoft Ajax events - part 2: exposing events from custom classes
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Microsoft Ajax events - part 1: subscribing
When building Ajax applications, you basically deal with two kinds of events. First, there are DOM events, and second, events from JavaScript objects. This second category is not part of the EcmaScript specs (or of the DOM specs, of course) so each framework needs to define its own pattern to expose events. This makes it more difficult for developers to include components built on different frameworks into a single page, which is one of the problems that OpenAjax tries to solve. I'll get back to this in a future post and show how to integrate Microsoft Ajax events in the OpenAjax hub.