david-mark

Unobtrusive JS === Unrealistic JS

In general, Web developers want to be seen using the very latest and "greatest" Web technologies. We want to add buzzwords to our CV's as soon as they are coined and want to be considered "cutting edge" developers who are "moving the Web forward". Unfortunately, history takes a dim view of our exuberance and science ignores it completely.

Best to start at the beginning with DOM0, which came out in the 90's. Here we have a button that alerts when clicked:

<button type="button" onclick="window.alert('Hello world!')">Click me!</button>

david-mark

Have been fighting with some RWD "expert" on Wikipedia of late. At the time of this writing, my edits to the related article are still visible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_Web_Design

RWD is just a buzzword. According to the article (and a fairly recent book it seems), it incorporates these techniques:

1. Use EM units to size text (and containers of text of course).
2. Use media queries
3. Let the browser scale images (by using em's instead of pixels)

david-mark

The big question regarding the upcoming (and thoroughly unneeded) 2.0 version of this most dubious script is whether its authors are foolish enough to leave "Sizzle" (their QSA fallback) in the code. If they are foolish enough to offer a "solution" that breaks IE 8- users (or requires conditional comments to avoid doing so), can they possibly think that they need anything but QSA to query the DOM?

Another looming question is how a project that has no way to keep track of plug-in compatibility with just one fork going to handle two at once? Poorly I imagine, but that's for those who remain on board to worry about.

Let's deconstruct this "magic" script. It's roughly 70% "Sizzle" (and supporting functions), 10% "Live" (an atrocious event system), 10% outmoded special effects (which can be done far more efficiently with CSS3 transitions and animations) and 10% miscellaneous (and often wildly confused) DOM "normalization" functions (e.g. measuring the viewport dimensions, reading and writing attributes/propertie

david-mark

Was asked to look at this thing again; only reviewed the JS portion. Last I checked, the CSS was similarly reality-challenged. Graphics are nice, but are tantamount to the paint job on a used car. Under the hood, this thing is all junk. It's hard to imagine the innards of any Web or mobile device-based application would end up like this, which raises the question of whether the authors have ever written such applications (or any amount of meaningful JS).

/**
 * @class Ext
 * @singleton

There (still) are no "classes" or "singletons" in JS (starting off on the wrong foot by mangling JS terms).

david-mark

Forget AMD and that's straight from the source. Sorry for the long build-up on the history, but if I'm to convince you to forget this non-technology, I think it's best you know where it came from. For those in a hurry, the executive summary is in the subject line. ;)

In Spring of 2009, I rewrote the Dojo loader during a requested renovation of that project. The primary pattern used to make it more practical was:

dojo.provide('foo', ['bar1', 'bar2'], function() {

[module code]

});