Originally proposed by Douglas Crockford (and blogged on the YUI blog by Eric Miraglia), the Module Pattern has recently been through several iterations of pimpage (look Ma — a new buzzword!) at the hands of Christian Heilmann; the first entitled “Show love to the Module Pattern” and the second, “Again with the Module Pattern“. Before reading this post, I’d recommend you read all of these articles otherwise this is going to make very little sense!

Having used the pattern quite regularly over the last six months or so, I’d like to add my two-pennies-worth to the discussion with a couple of variations on the theme…

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Although this behaviour has been fixed in the beta of version 3, any users still browsing with version 2 or below still suffer this needless blight on web accessibility.

I’ve recently reworked the JavaScript used in Steve Marshall’s tasty channelled search solution, which requires the label to be clickable, as it hides the corresponding radio input. For this reason, I’ve written a quick bit of JavaScript to activate this behaviour.

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Enter the YUI. *cue Enter The Dragon theme*

So here’s a tasty little script that wraps Ajax requests and a YUI Custom Event in an instantiable object that works as an Ajax DAO…

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Isabella Ada Huegdon (5lb 10oz) and Amélie Isla Huegdon (5lb 5oz) arrived at 10:02am and 10:27am respectively on the 23rd of May, 2007. I haven’t had time to upload loads of pictures yet, but watch my Flickr stream; there are a few there already.

I’m very happy to be a Dad although it’s pretty hard going at the moment; in fact, I reckon one baby must be an absolute doddle. To be fair though, Meegan is doing the majority of the work at the moment since I leave for work at 6:30am and get home at 8pm.

Anyway, as far as the blog is concerned, normal service will resume shortly (I’m writing a couple of posts at the moment).

I’m featured in the “Expert Advice” section of .net magazine this month. I’ve written a short piece on understanding HTML’s element identifiers; IDs and classes.

.net magazine is a great resource for both experienced and newbie web developers. It contains invaluable tutorials, great articles, and a wealth of web development information. So if you haven’t already got it, you should definitely go out and buy it right now!

I’m on page 106. Please don’t be put off by my horribly deformed exterior — I’m beautiful on the inside.

You can find a photograph of the article on my Flickr account.

My first port of call is the underlying structure of my HTML - it’s ok, but it could definitely be improved.

I recently had a fantastic conversation with Mike Pearce - an old colleague (who’s now a good friend) - regarding document structure in HTML. Whilst peer-reviewing some of his code, I noticed some not-uncommon structural characteristics that, although not wrong, definitely didn’t convey the best semantics within the document. For this reason I thought I’d document some of the stuff I’ve learned about structured HTML and open it up for comment.

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Sure, JavaScript has it’s flaws and shortcomings; but then, so does my wife and I still love her! (Although, obviously she’d disagreed. She’d probably have something to say about being compared to a programming language too - just as well she doesn’t read my blog then, eh?)

Anyhoo, recently I’ve had the pleasure of working rather extensively with my afore-mentioned language du jour. For this reason, I needed to dig out the reference material and, since I haven’t blogged anything remotely useful for a while, I thought I’d share my choice cuts with the blogosphere.

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Last night I went to see Cirque du Soleil perform “Alegria”, their new show, at the Royal Albert Hall.

It was my mother-in-law’s birthday; but we hadn’t told her where we were going so, when her and Meeg turned up outside my office late yesterday afternoon, she was none-the-wiser. When I finally made it downstairs to the street, they were both clearly very excited (although I’m not sure whether that was due to what might be coming or the fact that they’d just spent 5 or 10 minutes staring into the window of Angels’ Fancy Dress shop).

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The exponential growth of processor speeds and memory and hard drive sizes sometimes catches me off guard. I mean, I’m well aware of Moore’s Law; but since I can still remember the days of programming with only 16k at your disposal, the mind boggles!

Jesse James Garrett raises an interesting point whilst contemplating The Desktop Terabyte.

Still, at least server-side back-up scripts won’t cause so many problems with all that lovely extra space… Uh… Right Stu?

My website has been down for a couple of days due to a couple of server issues, but it’s all back up and running now thanks to some hard work from my server-buddy, Stu.

Needless to say, having spent the Christmas period away from my computer and the blogosphere, I have returned revitalised and refreshed. I’m also pretty good at Viva Pinata now as well.