David’s Web Development Blog

Nicholas Zakas has a nice writeup on creating a binary search tree in JavaScript as part of his computer science series, where he’s explaining basic CS principles such as bubble sorting and linked lists entirely in JavaScript.  This is a great idea in many ways, most of all because it further separates learning programming from [...]

Lately I’ve been a bit addicted to answering questions on Yahoo! Answers.  I think it’s because of the excitement I feel when I can finally find a question I can answer!  Anyhow, one of the recent questions was regarding global variables in JavaScript.  One person responded incorrectly that writing “var” in front of variable [...]

XML, JSON, YQL.  Is that enough acronyms for you? XML and JSON you’ve probably heard about, but maybe not YQL, which is Yahoo!’s SQL-esque query language which was released to the public late last year.  It’s primarily advertised as a service to access data from Yahoo! properties such as Flickr and Yahoo! News.  What you may [...]

John Resig: “The DOM Is a Mess” @ Yahoo! Video John Resig, who will constantly be younger than me yet much smarter than I’ll ever be, gave a talk at Yahoo last week regarding various issues relating to Javascript development and the DOM.  He had some interesting things to say about how jQuery goes about [...]

The second edition of Nicholas C. Zakas’s Professional JavaScript for Web Developers has just been released, and thanks to the YUI Blog, there’s an entire chapter (Chapter 18: Advanced Techniques) available for free online. I do have the first edition but so far haven’t sat down to read it.  Skimming over the free chapter, however, is [...]

If you’ve done any sort of work with rounded corners on webpages, you know that they can be tricky to pull off.  In any case, it’s a lot harder than it really should be.  Working with rounded corners is almost like adding graphical borders around elements as if the CSS border property didn’t exist.  It’s [...]

As you may or may not know, there are users across the internet who don’t have Javascript.  Yes, that might be shocking and terrifying, but you have to deal with it! Good websites try to code in such a way that allows all users to access content, with or without Javascript or other plugins.  This is [...]

I’m starting to dabble in some JQuery just for fun.  After learning a lot about YUI over my summer internship at Yahoo, I wanted to see how other Javascript frameworks accomplish similar tasks. So far I like the selectors in JQuery.  Their similarity to CSS selectors makes a lot of sense.  It makes sense to retain [...]

Since I’m in the middle of transitioning from beginner Javascript to what I consider intermediate Javascript, I’ve often been faced with the intimidating task of using Regular Expressions. It’s no easy task.  The syntax is ridiculously difficult to read and probably harder to write, at least for the uninitiated (i.e. normal people like me).  Javascript guru [...]

Douglas Crockford: “Web Forward” @ Yahoo! Video Check this out!  I was there!  I’m the guy fiddling around with the camera in the front row, half paying attention