webschuur.com

Nice tip for all the Drupal hackers out there: snipplr code snippets for Drupal. It also has an RSS feed. Obviously, as with any unknown source, one should never ever use these snippets (except when you know PHP well).

Oh, and there is a nice jQuery feed too.

AJAX is a fun and good thing, happening to the web right now. But I don’ like the way many people use it.

Digg sits on the top of my list of ajax-abuse. Not only does it make the site over 15 times slower (you can test it: switch of javascript and browse digg and compare that with javascript on).

But the proof of why and how Digg is Fsking up with javascript came today: I am not logged in, according to the silly popup. However, in the comment form, you can see that Digg knows me, and that digg has me signed in.

update: after some stupid editing of mine, I brought the points down to six. thanks to Bert for telling me I am fool.

More and more often I have to cope with designers in the process of creating Drupal sites. That is a good sign: Drupal matures, so it gets used in more multitalented, professional environments. Not just a pimpled student in the attic who knows some Photoshop and some Javascript and learns some PHP, but project cycles with multidiscplinary teams involved.

The biggest bottleneck, in all this, however, I find, is the wrongly skilled designer.

Ajax is no longer hot, its a commodity. Rich javascript is found all over the place. This is a bad thing. Or at least something we should be worried about. We, being people who care about usability.

Not because javascript is bad, not because of the fact that many javascript is written extremely bad. But because it gives developers an excuse not to work on usability.

Being a Javascript Lover

I am a javascript lover. Back in the days I put javascript in every site I built. You know, the stuff that would alert(‘Your browser is too old’). But ever since then I have held my sepsis for use of it too. Javascript is not evil, nor is it 42. It is merely a tool: use it right, and it is good. Use it wrong and it turns evil.

Often you want receive more information, with your autofill widget POST data. Currently all you get is a string, optional with comma separated values.

What yo really want to send along in a POST, is at least a unique ID, such as the node ID, or user ID.

For that you need a better interface, IMO. Comma separated values in a single textarea is just fine for Tagging, but anything beyond that requires an interface that allows you to simply add/remove or change what you have found.

This mock-up is a proposal for that. I designed it for Clipper, which wants to find parent nodes.

It downgrades fine (see the bottom set, for how non-JS versions will behave.