On Wednesday night I attended the preview of a new exhibition, Dinosaurs Unleashed, on Oxford Street. It’s a slightly surreal experience seeing life size animatronic dinosaurs backdropped by the office blocks and department stores of central London.
I’ve already written about it on the Visit London blog and you can see more photos on Flickr. And, in a isn’t the internet cool moment, this morning I was added as a Flickr contact by the workshop who produced the dinosaurs and you can see behind the scenes photos of them being made.
I’ve been writing JavaScript for almost as long as the language has existed. My first “script” was a simple onMouseOver="window.status='Hello World'" affair back in the days of Netscape 2. I spent the dot.com years writing popup windows and hover images and scrolling boxes and other basic stuff. Then I took a break from doing much JavaScript – this almost exactly coincided with the years that some “proper” programmers took a a look at the language and applied a bit of rigour to it. So when I got back into JavaScript a few years ago I was way behind the curve.
I’ve managed to catch up a little and by using the jQuery library plus a few plugins I’ve done some quite cool things despite not having the sort of knowledge that real JavaScript pros have these days.
I’m a front end engineer, I’m not a “proper” programmer, I don’t come from a programming background and have had close to zero formal training. I only vaguely understand the principles behind object oriented programming and design patterns and so on and I think that I think that they are good things, but I have no real idea of how to apply them to my code.
Speaking of which, unminified it’s 70Kb, 1500 lines and growing. There’s a big refactoring job that needs doing there before it becomes impossible to maintain. But how to start?
Had my photo used in a (gay) mockup of a what our Valentine’s Day homepage could look like.
Had lots of fun combining Ajax, JSON, RSS, JSP and jQuery in various combinations.
Moved the breadcrumb trail from just inside the main content area to just before it … in many, many templates.
Wondered whether any of the ARIA landmark roles was suitable for a block that contained a breadcrumb trail, a print button and an RSS feed button. contentinfo or nothing seem to be the options.
Told my boss that I needed to refactor all the JavasScript (that I had written in the first place) on the whole site.
Wasn’t ill enough to go home to bed, maybe tomorrow. (Damn this really quite good immune system!)
Boggled at the photos of Ben Dalby in a straight jacket!
Spent most of Survivors thinking about the benefits of CGI vs something actually decent looking when it came to collapsing buildings.
A few of you may remember this sterling piece of work from last year. Well today I found a very similar case on another site.
<a href="#mainsection" class="skip">skip to content</a>
<a href="#topnav" class="skip">skip to main navigation</a>
<a href="#topnav" class="skip">skip to main navigation</a>
“skip to main navigation” is repeated twice…
but does nothing as “topnav” is not present anywhere on the page
The skip links aren’t wrapped in any form of structure (thus also requiring the class=”skip” on each link)
The site claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional but has 76 validation errors, including a character encoding mismatch between the HTTP header and the meta tag. It calls in 8 external CSS files and 23 external JavaScript files and contains large chunks of commented out HTML (so it will be slow as well as inaccessible).
Compared with this, some of my stuff is not so bad after all.
cranky
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