Tag Archives: JavaScript programming language

Should I do Something Only Because Crockford Says So?

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Crockford says: “Don’t do that, please stop doing it!?” It may be related to JavaScript, YUI, CSS or whatever. PPK recently posted about browser prefixes with the same intonation. OK, fine, it’s difficult to maintain, it’s ugly but my job is to make the site look as nice as possible.

I agree with Crokford that only with copy/paste now JavaScript has the reputation of badly standardized language with no programmers that understand it at all. It’s true, but however this maybe made JavaScript so popular, now all the libraries come with that abstraction in mind and this gap seems to be smaller.

In addition I’ll say that’s fine if Crockford or PPK say something like that, but the primary goal of every web developer is not to be in good relations with Crockford, but to satisfy clients! I’d like to repeat – clients!

jQuery: what about this.title?

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In my last post I was talking about the short way to access the id attribute:

this.id;
this.attr('id'); // this is the same but slower

Beside the most important thing that this is the slower notation, you get also larger notation, which in JavaScript is really pain.

What’s interesting is that you can access almost every attribute of an element with that notation. Take a look at the following example:

<img src="image.jpg" title="test" />

and than

$('element').title

This is much faster and quite nice in place of

$('element').attr('title');

JavaScript Snippets: IF Statements Optimization

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A “Typical Installation” …

As most of the desktop software gives us opportunity to choose from typical or custom installations, let me write what’s a typical IF conditional statement in JavaScript and … every other programing language.

if ( thisIsTrue ) {
    printMe("some message");
}

A “Custom Installation” …

The first thing you can improve from the code above is removing the brackets.

if ( thisIsTrue )
    printMe("someMessage");

Because in JavaScript everything’s on the client – every symbol matters. What if we remove as much as we can!

thisIsTrue && printMe("someMessage");

Javascript Libraries Popularity

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JavaScript and Market Share?!

It’s kind of strange to speak about JavaScript libraries and market share, so lets called it “popularity”. Have you ever been interested on which is the most famous JS library.

I’d guess everybody has the answer in his head, right? jQuery is becoming for the JS community something like Google for the web or IE6 on the browser’s market in the beginning of the century. How odd?!

However here’s a short list of who’s first.

1. Robert Nyman’s poll:

Note: original poll page’s here.

Clear enough jQuery rocks. As I personally use jQuery I still think that its success is based on his easy to start nature. However lets see another result chart.

2. Chris Coyier from http://css-tricks.com is showing almost the same result:

Note: original poll can be found here.

3. Finally Polldaddy’s hosting a poll, where the results are even more interesting.

Polldaddy

Note: original source of the poll.

From these results I get more surprised not so much from the jQuery big advantage, but more from YUI. It’s a really very very powerful JavaScript library, perhaps misunderstood maybe because of it’s native complexity, don’t know?!

What make JavaScript closures work?

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Closures again

Most of the JavaScript developer don’t even know what a JS closure is and that’s why Crockfrod is so angry. Yes, it’s true, most of the “developers” just copy and paste the code without even know how it works. OK, just in breve the closure is an anonymous function, which thus helps you define a pseudo namespace, as you may know that in a function everything is visible inside it and only there.

function myFunc() {
    var a = 10;
}

The code above makes the variable a to be visible only inside the function. But as you know there must be a function call to make “all this code work”.

myFunc();

However you can make an anonymous function – or a closure, where the function is with no name and is called once the code has been processed. The right syntax is like so:

(function() { var a = 10; })();

Why and how?

The question is: why and how that works? Why this syntax is correct?

Hint

A tiny hint is that you can make the following line working:

var myFunc = function(){ var a = 10; }();

Pay attention to this syntax and the assignment is what makes all this working.