Two weeks ago we held our MIX conference in Las Vegas.  MIX is my favorite conference of the year – since it nicely integrates development and design topics together in a single event, and is usually accompanied by some pretty cool product announcements.

Ah, that time of year is here again. The day of the “Microsoft bought us” jape. Are there some good’uns this year?
The early chaps who jumped the line a touch were the smashing magazine people talking about IE 8.1, all with WebKit/Gecko integration, fast JavaScript, CSS 3 support, and more.
Then Opera does something actually quite [...]

I didn’t want the TaskSpeed library task test suite to be lost in the Dojo 1.3 announcement. Alex called it out:

Pete Higgins has been working on a new set of benchmarks with the help of other toolkit vendors (to ensure fairness) called “TaskSpeed“. Dojo 1.3 wins by a wide margin. Across all the reported browsers [...]

We have been using Dojo 1.3 release candidates for awhile on Bespin, and today the Dojo team released Dojo 1.3 just in time for Internet Explorer 8.1 (really? some people believed that? I know that it isn’t quite April Fools……).
There are some nice usable APIs added to base such as:
PLAIN TEXT
JAVASCRIPT:

// create a div.

var n [...]

Dean Edwards has a subtle piece on callbacks vs. events where he calls out the issue of libraries that support custom events dying out when one custom event dies.
First, Dean sets the stage:
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JAVASCRIPT:

document.addEventListener(”DOMContentLoaded”, function() {

  console.log(”Init: 1″);

  DOES_NOT_EXIST++; // this will throw an error

}, false);

document.addEventListener(”DOMContentLoaded”, function() {

  console.log(”Init: 2″);

}, false);

Which outputs the correct:

Init: 1

Error: [...]

Anne van Kesteren has posted on the specs that are moving out of the large HTML5 mega spec, and into their own little ditties:

The current state of things is that the following editor drafts are separated out from HTML5:

Server-Sent Events: Defines the EventSource API.
Web Storage: Defines the database, session, and persistent storage API.
The Web Sockets [...]

We mentioned that a new excanvas was released to keep up support with IE 8. Well, Louis-Rémi Babe has detailed his travails finding out what what changed in IE 8 VML land:

Although the VML specification hasn’t undergone any improvements or modifications since its publication back in 1998, Microsft development team felt like considerably changing the [...]

Just last week a few of us were discussing the riches that await discovery in the various computer science research paper archives and today Peter Bergström wrote in to tell us that he’s finished work on his PaperCube research paper search engine (which we mentioned when it was incomplete some time ago).
Bsaed on SproutCore, PaperCube [...]

Christian Johansen is tired of:

mentally decoding test names like “testNewUserWithClownShoesShouldSqueak”, so I’ve written some code to improve readability for JavaScript unit tests written using JsUnitTest (from prototypejs). It’s heavily inspired by Ruby frameworks Shoulda and Context.

Tests with his new framework–called jscontext–look like this:
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JavaScript:

new Test.Unit.Runner({

    “A new User”: JsContext({

        “with clown [...]

Nicole Sullivan has a very detailed post on reflow and repaints and how they affect performance (and also how to potentially avoid them).
What are they again?

A repaint occurs when changes are made to an elements skin that changes visibility, but do not affect its layout. Examples of this include outline, visibility, or background color. According [...]