Let’s say you have a page with a list and you want to do something when someone clicks on the list items:

<ul id="taskList">
   <li>first item</li>
   <li>second item</li>
   ...
</ul>

Typically, with jQuery you would attach handlers to the list items like so:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('#taskList li').bind('click', function(){
        doSomething();
   });
});

So far so good, but suppose you want to insert a list under the element you click on? You will also need to attach handlers for the items you’ve inserted! Let’s see:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('#taskList li').bind('click', function(){
        insertSublistUnder(this);
        // now let's attach the new handlers
        $(this).find('li').bind('click', function(){
             insertSublistUnder(this);
             // now let's attach the new handlers...
             // hey, wait a minute !!!!
       });
   });
});

You see the pattern here, it could go on and on !!!
So how do you do this?

Short answer: if your version of jQuery is 1.3+, use live instead of bind to attach the handlers (this ensures that all <li> inserted in the future will have their handlers bound automatically:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('#taskList li').live('click', function(){
        insertSublistUnder(this);
   });
});

But what do you do if you’re stuck in pre-1.3 land ?
Let’s see, we are attaching handlers which in turn insert some items and… attach some handlers which…
We have a bit of recursion here:

$(document).ready(function(){  <------------------\
    $('#taskList li').bind('click', function(){   |
        insertSublistUnder(this);                 |
        // here call this ------------------------/
        // on the newly inserted items
   });
});

Let’s pack the recursive snippet into a function, say, ‘ attachHandlersUnder’, which takes a (clicked) list element as a parameter:

function attachHandlersUnder(li){
   $(li).find('li').bind('click', function(){
        insertSublistUnder(this);
        attachHandlersUnder(this); // recursive definition
   });
} 

$(document).ready(function(){
    attachHandlersUnder('#taskList'); //
});

Et voila !
Well, in essence… It is actually a bit more complicated, since calling ‘bind’ repeatedly on an element keeps adding handlers to the ones previously set.

Here’s a file with the final code.

Quirk 1: + as addition and concatenation

Javascript, unlike other languages use the same symbol for number addition and string concatenation:

1 + 1 => 2
'1' + '1' => '11'


Quirk 2: implicit type conversion

Javascript does not always throw an error when evaluating expressions with an odd mix of values and operators, such as, ‘10′ / ‘5′, instead it tries to converts values behind the scene (yes, you should be scared). Usually strings involved in arithmetic operations are converted to number, so :

'10' / 5 => 10 / 5 => 2

So it seems safe to assume that string representation of numbers will be treated as numbers  in arithmetic operations, right ? Not so if the + operator is involved! Remember:

'1' + '1' => '11'

Form and formula

Suppose we have a form that asks for two numbers, and some Javascript which calculates the average. Let’s say the user types ‘1′ and ‘1′:

// Form values are strings
var number1 = $('#number1').val(); // '1'
var number2 = $('#number2').val(); // '1'
var average = (number1 + number2) / 2 ; // 5.5 !!


we get 5.5 instead of 1 because (number1 + number2) is concatenation and not addition.

The workaround in that case is to convert the form values to numbers beforehand :

var number1 = Number($('#number1').val()); // 1
var number2 = Number($('#number2').val()); // 1
var average = (number1 + number2) / 2 ; // 1


What makes this especially bad, is that the program appears to be working; it just silently returns the wrong result ! So remember, be cautious when using strings and addition in Javascript…

It appears that not only have Microsoft been poring over my posts here on Beyond Standards where Apple have failed to meet my meagre needs, Asus apear to have taken it a step further.

With a spanking new prototype on display at CES, the Asus Eee Keyboard PC looks like a brilliant idea.

Where I only asked for a stand-alone multi-touch trackpad, Asus have taken the concept one step further by cramming an entire ultra-portable PC into a keyboard with most of the industrial design queues of Cupertino’s finest.

With a built in touchscreen instead of the customary number pad you could have everything from a calendar to email and RSS widgets on there, instantly hot-swappable with a number pad or even bespoke gaming or multimedia control. Genius.

Now if they could just create a simpler version which is just a keyboard and trackpad so I can buy one for work and at least 2 for home I will be a happy man!

Lets just hope that they make it look nice, feel nice, and work well… unlike Vista (sorry - I had to say it. We’ve got a Vista machine at home and I had to use it recently when the VPN to work stopped playing nice with my MacBook, and I just can’t use Windows any more - it makes me want to break things).

I know Apple have a chequered history when it comes to the humble pointing device (i.e. they’ve never really made a good one), but it just seems to be a no-brainer when they’ve already got the technology in place in the MacBook Pro line (and the iPhone), they’ve already got a simple aesthetic that it could fit into very nicely, and they’ve got an image-conscious target audience who would benefit from the interface options that it would present.

Surely I’m not the only one who thinks that a multi-touch trackpad would pretty much kick ass in place of the old-school mouse? Am I?

Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?..

In August, the future of JS, Ecmascript-4, was buried only to be born again as ECMAScript-Harmony. It is a lot less complex and we should see the first implementations early next year.

Meanwhile, JS browser engines are out-speeding each other, bringing closer the day when JS will render and animate in your browser as smoothly as Flash or a Desktop application:

In June, Webkit, announced SquirrelFish, their next generation JS engine. It now compiles JS syntax tree to bytecode, making SquirrelFish 1.5 times faster than Firefox 3.

On Saturday, Mozilla announced that TraceMonkey, the next version of their JS engine, will be available in FF 3.1. It incorporates the Tracing Just-In-Time compiler Adobe developed for Actionscript and is roughly twice faster than FF3’s engine (6 times faster at manipulating images) !

Great ! But how does it work ? TraceMonkey finds hotspots, selected parts of the software where a lot of time is spent, based on the actual execution of the program. These hotspots are then compiled into native instructions the computer can understand. This selective compilation doesn’t require a lot of memory (unlike entire programs compilers), which means that it’s also good for mobile devices, one of Mozilla’s main focuses for browser development.

To get an idea of the speedup, here is a screencast showing image manipulations with FF3 and with FF3.1 (with TraceMonkey).

To try TraceMonkey, get a nightly of Firefox 3.1, open about:config, and set javascript.options.jit.content to true (it’s disabled by default).

Both SquirrelFish and TraceMonkey take advantage of cutting edge Programming Language research, and it’s just the beginning of JS implementation speed-ups, they say ! Microsoft has to step up its game !

Maybe Steve Yegge was onto something after all…

PS: Oh yes and Google just announced they are launching a new browser, Chrome, based on Webkit it will feature… V8, a new Javascript engine, meant to be faster and safer ! So there we are, Mozilla, Apple and now Google are raising the bar.

I’ve long been fascinated by plots and graphs (in a former life I even lectured about them) and particularly in the majority of their authors’ misguided notions that they need to convey every last piece of information in the source data (as opposed to trends, important features and comparative values).

Google Analytics has recently redesigned to introduce (amongst many other things) Sparklines to quickly convey trends in data using small, information rich graphics:

These are great examples of discarding the dangerous notion that for a graphic to be valuable has to convey actual figures.

Anyway, I’m drifting from my original motivation for this post … hands up who thinks it’s possible to qualify the statement ‘Windows is less secure than Linux’ with two graphics that have no directly discernible information on them?

Well, Richard Stiennon recently presented two beautiful images that show system calls on Apache (Linux) and IIS (Windows) in response to a request for a simple HTML page. Time runs down the left, each dark blotch is process and the lines show the hierarchy of system calls. The more calls, the more connections, and the more effort is required to secure an application.

Apache (Linux):

IIS (Windows):

So which one do you think is more secure?

Remember the bad old days? When Netscape, Opera, Internet Explorer 5, Mozilla et al caused constant headaches and wrangling over how the same site was going to be delivered to such a vast array of browsers and still look and function consistently? We cried, we wailed, we shook our fists at the devils for making it so bloody complicated. There’s only ONE specification you morons, why don’t you all follow it?

How self-satisfied and smug we all felt when enterprising souls like the Web Standards Project constantly campaigned for consistency, and the devils listened.

While the headaches of cross browser compatibility will never go away (software manufacturers will always have their whims) the playing field is so level at the moment that we’re pumping less and less into browser specific style sheets. In fact, we’re pumping less and less into style sheets full stop: in our recently launched site for the Royal Armouries for instance, we’ve only 390 lines in the core style sheet (including nice formatting, comments and line-spaces) and most satisfyingly, less than 39 lines of browser specific styles (in conditionally commented out style sheets).

Where am I going with all this?

Mobile development, that’s where.

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No, not the refugee city in northern France, but Calais, a content tagging web-service. I couldn’t quite get my head around it to begin with, but when it clicked, it’s status as a truly great idea was cemented (in my head, at least).

The idea is that you can send a piece of content (up to 100,000 characters) to Calais (via a SOAP or POST call to their web-service API) and it’ll analyse the text you’ve sent and return a list of metadata that it thinks appropriate to the content. It’s fairly easy to imagine how it can do this, with access to common vocabularies, archives of content/appropriate meta-data, and some neat search algorithms, but it’s such a stunningly simple and useful service I’m amazed no-one else has done this before.

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Johnny Chung Lee has posted 3 short YouTube videos which bring the futuristic vision of Stephen Spielberg’s Minority Report a little closer to 2008’s reality, with a touch of Blue Peter practicality.

Is this the future of human-computer interaction? Maybe not, but it does pose some very interesting questions about how soon we might be able to un-tether the keyboard and mouse and interact with technology
in a more flowing, natural way (and have more fun blasting videogame bad-guys too).

I want this hooked up to my mac. Now!!!

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I’ve tried and liked trackballs (not finely controllable enough for neat Photoshop work if you’ve consumed anything with caffeine in it), graphics tablets (lovely, but take up too much desk space for a decent resolution as I can’t get on with the A5 sized ones), and even decent optical mice (let’s not talk about any incarnation of Apple mouse, shall we), but none of them have been quite right.

So here it is - my final plea:

Dear Mr Jobs,

Please get your nice apple technical bods to design a multi-touch trackpad that can sit next to my nice new low-profile mac keyboard. It should be a simple USB trackpad that could be used to the left or right of the keyboard, square in shape with a widescreen aspect active surface, with the same height and depth as the keyboard. You’ve already go the technology in the MacBook Pro line, so you just need to make it a bit bigger.

That would really be rather good.

Thanks in advance,
Andy Hawkes (aged 32 1/2)

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find . -name .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

You can run it from inside any folder to remove all .svn folders from it and all it’s child folders. Beautiful.

— Kudos to Red 91

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Yeah, me too.

(more…)

It occurred to me recently that we’re remarkably poor at showing off keeping track of the projects that we have worked on recently as they seem to blur into one long stream of endless work, so here’s a nice little reminder of the stuff that Cimex have recently released into the wild (and not so recently, actually):

• London Climate Change Action (launched 3/12/2007)
• Peoples 50 Million give-away (launched 23/10/2007)
  
• School Food Trust
• CBBC - TMi
• Shelter - Build a city
• GambleAware
• Institute of Physics
• 11 Million
• Ben Sherman
• Big Picture TV (winner of the 2007 IVCA Clarion Award for Best Communications product)
• DIY Planet Repairs (shortlisted for a BIMA Government and Information Award 2007)
  
• GOJO
• Filmclub

It’s been an interesting period of change at Cimex Towers of late…

I am pleased to announce that Mr Harper has grasped the reins of power with both hands as the recently appointed Head of Development, taking command of the newly amalgamated HTML and Programming teams, whilst I am now supporting him as Senior Web Technologist.

So, “what does all that mean?” I hear you cry.

Basically we’re entering a new era of more streamlined production with front-end and back-end development taking on a more unified approach and providing a more joined-up process internally. And Mr Harper is now the big boss™.

The Cimex dream team has also acquired some new faces:

• Mr Mark Everard joins us with his .NET skillz
• Mr Mark Ellison joins us with his Java skillz
• Mr Dom Geargeoura joins us with his PHP/HTML/CSS skillz

And that, as they say, is that.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled transmission…

After what seems like aeons of planning, designing, building, tweaking, fettling, re-jigging and generally tinkering with code the brand-new Cimex site is finally live.

Featuring the coding handywork of Messrs Barclay and Hawkes, the site is built on Wordpress with some very heavily customised templates, a handful of bespoke plugins, and a suitable measure of internal meeting-induced blood, sweat and tears.

The mighty Cimex are looking for one or two ASP/.NET developers to join our elite team.We have got a formal spec but I personally found it excedingly dry so here’s my slightly less official take on it:

• You should be an experienced ASP/.NET developer
• You should have at least a passing acquaintance with semantic HTML, and preferably be on good speaking terms (perhaps the odd dinner here and there too).
• You should be able to produce clean, functional code which doesn’t bugger up our lovely clean HTML templates and cause us to lament your birth in terms that would shame a marine.
• You should be dedicated to producing a quality product, not just a quick result
• You should preferably know your way around XML and SOAP or at least be able to lie very convincingly and learn exceedingly quickly when caught out.

If you’re interested then please reply to the email address on the formal spec page or if you would prefer you can drop me a line in the first instance - andy dot hawkes at cimex dot com - and I’ll pass it on.

Please note: Cimex are an equal opportunities employer and seek to attract applications from any qualified candidates. We are currently running slightly short on our quota of ninjas, dwarves (in the Tolkein milieu), and scantily-clad pirate maidens.

Note: No agencies that we don’t already work with (you know who you are), hawkers, beggars , or other tradesmen need apply.

After a brief hiatus and a relatively painless change of server, Beyond Standards is back.

There have been a few changes of personnel since we last set forth our stall on t’internet - Mr Box has abandoned Cimex and the commuter lifestyle in favour of a job with web-celebs clear:left and more time with his family (but not a ‘disgraced Tory MP sex-scandal’ kind of way), Mr Hawkes has seized the reins of power at Cimex and elevated Mr Harper to the enviable position as his second-in-command, and they’ve been joined by Mr Graham who brings a level head and an unstinting attention to detail to the team.

Mr Sekulowicz-Barclay has also abandoned the Cimex fold in search of fortune and glory on the gold-paved streets of London, and can now be found plying his wares at Outsideline.

And finally, the esteemed Mr Rigby has become a damnable tradesman and is hawking his fancy lotions and potions to all and sundry under the nom de guerre “Naked Man“.

So there you have it. All present and correct, refreshed, and raring to go!

How? Why?

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We’re not claiming to have produced an exhaustive list of best practices here, rather a reference that helps ensure anyone working with us can gauge the quality of the code they’re supplying. For no good reason, other than the fact that I rather like them, I’ve used Jordan’s web reworking of Jan Tschichold’s Penguin Composition Rules as a basis.

Let us know what we’ve missed.

Read Cimex’ Guidelines for xHTML/CSS/JS projects.

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One of the most useful features of the framework is how it allows you to easily build classes to encapsulate your code and prevent it from interfering with existing or future code. We have used it extensively at Cimex with some projects making use of three or four different classes, all running independently of each other while addressing the same DOM tree. However the implementation of events and event listeners with Prototype can seem a bit convoluted and unless you have been there before and know the tricks of the trade, can be very frustrating.

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The crux of the issue for me is the potentially negative implications of experience and user expectation which conspire to create a certain mental model of a website.

Are we really going to let the bad old days of nested tables for layout and mindless tag soup websites define the future of the web? Should the sins of the father be visited upon the son?

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Imagine my joy, therefore, when I heard about “a dynamic new government-backed service” whose accessibility page boasts that:

This website has been created with valid XHTML (Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and adheres to (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. Additionally the site meets with Bobby approved Conformance Level AA in association with the Web Content Guidelines.

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The question arose as to whether the use of » or > is acceptable as a right arrow (e.g. Next» or Next>), or whether that essentially qualifies as the dreaded “ASCII art” when it comes to accessibility auditing.

(more…)

<input type="text" placeholder="Type something here" />

Safari goes on to insert the specified ‘placeholder’ text into the value of the input field, until clicked on, when it disappears (and only reappears if the field is left empty). This is a great little idea as it provides a lovely, unobtrusive way to offer a very commonly used functionality.

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