I found this link through another blog and it really impressed me. It’s a full on html game. Will the speed of javascript and support for transparency bring death to simple Flash games or only new life to simple HTML games. Is there room for this yet again?
http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/BunnyHunt/
Archive for April, 2006
BunnyHunt
Thursday, April 13th, 2006AJAX workshop
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006We’re preparing a workshop at Spletne urice (“Web hours” in Slovenian, a weekly meeting of web enthusiasts) that will focus on AJAX, hosted by me and another Marko. Actually we’re preparing two of them. The first one will cover the basics of asynchronous transport and data, the second one will add some DOM scripting and review some AJAX frameworks.
I’m asking you, my ’till-now-non-existent/anonymous’ readers, to come forward and suggest any AJAX frameworks and/or sites that need/want an AJAX makeover. We might use this information for the workshop and transform your site. If you want to come you can register here. The workshop will probably be held in Slovenian, but the code will be written in universally understood JavaScript so come back for the slides and a showcase of the makeover.
Firefox hates developers
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006A few days ago I noticed that Firefox is not making any requests to cached pages. I was a Mozilla Suite user until a month ago when I finally switched. Now I’m seriouslly thinking about switching back.
I am a developer so seeing what request are being made to a server is of utmost importance. Mozilla had a setting which told it that it should always do a request, even if the content is already in cache. This resulted in many 304 responses. I know it causes more traffic – the default setting is something more network friendly.
Firefox removed this great feature. It’s even worse – if you set the size of cache to 0 it still caches stuff and does not make request to the server. If I knew I never would have switched. I’m downloading Seamonkey…
Why I don’t like widgets
Sunday, April 9th, 2006The reason is really simple – they’re bloated. Widgets is another word for a huge javascript that does what you want/need and a whole other stuff somebody needed or maybe just the developer thought somebody would someday need. Usually the javascript is so ‘complex’ that you can’t just remove the stuff you don’t need – it’d be faster if you wrote your own.
There is another reason that goes beyond javascript. Most widgets don’t exploit the technology and go about reinventing the wheel which results in crappy/invalid HTML, problems with data persistance and a low level of pluggability. Some actually do use an API but I think that’s overkill.
It’s funny what wikipedia says about widgets – clearly, they represent any purely mercantile commodity that has no artistic or spiritual value
. When I first started writing the SortedTable I wanted to accomplish the contrary. I tried to write something that would exploit the advantages of valid XHTML and the fact that you can nowadays rely on DOM functionality of the browser. I did it for me and not for money (and released it under CC license).
The problem is I got many feature requests, that could simply be accomplished via some DOM scripting and using the built-in event handlers. I decided to keep the script simple and display the possibilities through samples. What needs to be done next is the reimplementation of the sort function which is a bit slow – I already have an old implementation of Quicksort in javascript that is going to come in handy for this one.
Anyway, a new version is out. This is the changelist:
- corrected a weird error that broke some sorts in ie6
- added the possibility for a nonsortable column via class=”nosort” on the th cell
- added the possibility to ‘regroup’ tbody elements if there’s more than one (for whatever reason)
- added additional hook to put your custom javascript on (onsort)
Expectations…
Thursday, April 6th, 2006I want this blog to become a place where I can openly rant about stuff I don’t like (in hope it gets better), expose the stuff I do like (but seems to be hidden). I am also going to write about things I’m interested in and projects I do. First and foremost this will become my own personal resource for everything that comes my way and anything that I create in the process.This means that all my side projects like the infamous SortedTable will soon be merge into the blog. On a sidenote, there is a new version of the script in preparation with a few requested improvements. There’s already a to-do list for version 0.9.
As soon as I hack the WordPress to exclude a category from all the feeds I’ll start another separate feed called blurps that will hopefully contain many posts per day and be a sort of a link dump mashed up with little comments, annoyances or any other small piece of worthy information. Worthy to me and maybe others.
You probably noticed that it’s all going to be in English. Slovenia is just to small and this is also a good way to improve on my language skills.
Any comments are wellcome, especially good ones. Your expectations if any might be considered. Can’t promise anything else.
Restart
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006The decision was hard. I was never a writer who could re-read his own works. So having a blog or a personal webpage has never been an option. I had a few personal pages, but all of them were created out of the need to explore paths previously unknown. The explorer in me could never back down from a challenge. To see something I didn’t know how to achieve was too riddling and to welcoming. Many have suffered during these crusades -family, friends, exams.
A friend of mine once said, that he is doing what he’s doing because he likes it and he needs it. If there are others who share that feeling it’s a plus, a success. We often want the people around us to like what we’re doing. I wanted people to say I’m good at what I’m doing. And then one thay I stopped. Nobody knew what I was doing anyways. Everybody understands good grades but almost nobody understands why an HTML is good. Or for that matter almost any other thing I did in the past few years. Even when you find somebody that understands what you’re doing you’ll see that the views of “good” might be so different it’s hard to say which “good” is better. Mine, of course. I know, I’m being pretentious.
I think the time has come to grow up. To be able to read what I wrote and honestly say – this is crap. I need to improve.