Archive for April, 2010

BayJax organizer Gonzalo Cordero has announced that it’s time for another BayJax, and this time we’ll be celebrating the explosion of server-side JavaScript with Cinco de Node.js at Yahoo!. We have three fantastic speakers: Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js; Elijah Insua, creator of one of the major DOM abstractions for Node; and Dav Glass, a YUI engineer who has been blogging about his work getting YUI 3 running under Node.

Please join us on May 5th @Yahoo! HQ from 5:30pm to 9:00 p.m. As Gonzalo puts it: “Sombreros, ponchos and luchador outfits are encouraged.” RSVP on the BayJax Meetup page.

Ryan describes his talk this way:

It is well known that event loops rather than threads are required for high-performance servers. Javascript is a language unencumbered of threads and designed specifically to be used with asynchronous evented I/O, making it an attractive means of programming server software. Node.js ties together the V8 Javascript compiler with an event loop, a thread pool for making blocking system calls, and a carefully designed HTTP parser to provide a browser-like interface to creating fast server-side software. This talk will explain Node’s design and how to get started with it.”

Elijah, who will be Skyping in from New York, will talk about his project, jsdom, which provides the essential DOM abstractions that allow client-side, DOM-dependent JavaScript to run under Node.js. This is an important part of the paradigm shift, enabling levels of server- and client-side code reuse never possible before and allowing progressive enhancement to be a natural, efficient outgrowth of our development environment.

Dav will carry this theme forward, showing in practical terms how the foundation of Node.js, the abstractions in jsdom, and Dav’s own work to add BOM features to jsdom enable a full implementation like YUI to illustrate some of the enormous promise of this kind of development. You can read about Dav’s work here on YUIBlog (Part 1; Part 2).

Catch Up On Past BayJax Meetups

Gonzalo has organized a great series of BayJax events of late. Did you miss any? Here are the YUI Theater links for the latest in the series:

• Nicholas Zakas, Stoyan Stefanov, Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Matt Sweeney: High Performance JavaScript — Five contributors to O’Reilly’s High Performance JavaScript discuss advanced JavaScript and DOM scripting optimizations at the April 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.
• John Resig: Testing, Performance Analysis, and jQuery 1.4 — John Resig of Mozilla, creator of the popular jQuery JavaScript library, reviews options for testing and performance analysis in JavaScript and previews the significant changes coming soon in jQuery 1.4.
• Brad Neuberg: Introduction to HTML5 — Brad Neuberg of Google provides a wide-ranging introduction to HTML5 as it’s being implemented in modern browsers, including features such as SVG/Canvas, the video tag, database storage, app-cache, and more.

If you're in the Atlanta, GA area and interested in Google technologies, you should come down/over/up to the Google Midtown office for tonight's GTUG meeting. The first meeting was fun and positive, with lots of great discussion around GWT, App Engine, Android, and the state of technology overall. Tonight should be just as good, with the following agenda sketched out:

• Rick Thomas -- Wave Development
• David Chandler -- GWT and App Engine
• Lightning Talks
• General Discussion

When: 04/27 @ 7pm EDT
Where: Google Atlanta

Since the release of the IE9 Preview, we’ve gotten feedback on issues ranging from the tests we’ve submitted to the standards body to problems running particular sites. First – THANK YOU for the feedback. We updated the feedback system specifically for this purpose: to get and act on your feedback. This post offers a high level overview of the feedback overall, and a deeper look at a couple of specific issues that many people have reported.

As of April 16^th, people have logged 533 issues in Connect. We review each issue, and confirm we can reproduce the problem. If necessary, we ask the person who logged it for more information. We also consolidate duplicate items.

In looking through the confirmed issues, two are particularly interesting: displaying small fonts, and using GMail.  I’ll use these as examples of how we use your feedback. 

Displaying Small Fonts

Several people reported that while fonts in general are smoother and clearer, in some scenarios small fonts look less clear. This type of issue has certain characteristics that make your feedback crucial:

• Fonts render differently on different graphics hardware.
• People browse different sites, each with a different selection of font styles, colors, sizes, and background colors, and each impacted differently by Direct2D.

This is a good example of how your feedback directs changes to IE, and helps us scale to the many different combinations of hardware and sites used across the web.  For example, there’s a pattern around some scenarios, like light color fonts on dark backgrounds.

We’re working on improvements in DirectWrite’s ClearType font rasterization. Specifically, in the first Platform Preview, GDI logic was used to select fonts though DirectWrite was used to render them. That creates some text spacing differences. Future updates to the Platform Preview will use DirectWrite throughout and will address this spacing issue. In addition, we are making specific changes to the rendering algorithm when light text is displayed against a dark background.

Using GMail in the Platform Preview

Some users have run into an issue with button layout in Gmail. For some people GMail in the Platform Preview looks like this:

However, others reported that GMail looked like this for them:

The content GMail sends to IE is different in these two cases, and apparently the difference results in GMail not working correctly for some people.  This is an example of when we may come back to you for more information on an issue reported in Connect, and ask about details like the Browser Mode and Document Mode. 

Another GMail issue involves some links on pages not working in the IE9 Preview’s Standards Mode.  Standards Mode is where we build new features like SVG, DOM Events, and border-radius (Marc wrote about this and other modes previously) and thus it currently has incomplete features.  This issue is an example of trying to understand if the site isn’t working properly because of a problem with a new feature or because we haven’t finished implementing the features.  We use different debugging tools to make that determination.  For example, IE9 logs instances of unsupported events so we can quickly see if the issue might simply be a missing event.  Here’s the output when loading GMail:

That tells us not to expect the site to function perfectly since it’s trying to use features that are not yet implemented.

We also have internal debugging tools to turn off the new eventing model entirely.  With the new eventing model disabled, GMail works correctly.  We further debugged and found the events register properly using addEventListener (good), they fire correctly (good), but fail to initiate any action (bad).  We’re still working through this issue.  In the meantime, you can use GMail in the Platform Preview by clicking ‘Debug’ and choosing ‘Force IE8 Document Mode’. 

That’s it for now.  Thanks again for taking the time to use the Platform Preview and sending us your feedback!

John Hrvatin
Program Manager

We're excited to announce the addition of 6 new languages (Greek, Russian, Serbian, Sanskrit, Amharic, Tigrinya) to the Transliteration API. Using Google Transliteration you can convert Roman characters to their phonetic equivalent in your language. Note that this is not the same as translation — it's the sound of the words that are converted from one alphabet to the other.

After another nice edition of YUI: Open Hours on Friday, we’ll round out this week with just a few notes recent notes and implementations from the YUI development community:

• YUI 2 on Discovery.com: Discovery Channel’s media-rich site makes use of YUI 2.8.0 Animation and Connection Manager, among other components.
  
• YUI 3/Node.js Work Reviewed by @dalmaer: “Oh, and YUI 3 is Looking Really Nice These Days”: Dion Almaer takes a look at Dav Glass’s YUI 3/Node.js work in Ajaxian.  Write’s Dion: “Oh, and YUI3 is looking really nice these days. A nice balance between a nice API + really nice looking widgets + a Crockford’s-worth of security care.”
  
• YUI 2 on RealCyclist.com: At my age, when the road gets steep you start looking for a lighter bike.  (Eating less may be less expensive, but it’s less fun.) And if you look on RealCyclist.com, you can shop on a site powered by a wide range of YUI 2 components.  On a related topic, BonkTown — a bargain site for cyclists — is also YUI-powered, and you can pick up items like shoe covers that make your feet more aerodynamic in a time trial.
  
• Free Test-tracker Cuanto Using YUI 2 DataTable, Tabs, Containers: Todd Wells wrote in to tell us about Cuanto: “Cuanto is a free tool for storing automated and manual test results, organizing them into logical groups, analyzing the nature of individual test failures, and using the resulting data to provide useful statistics. It uses the YUI 2 library extensively, including Container, Event, DataTable, Button and TabView.” (Original source.)
  
• Run a PHP Script in the Background Using AJAX [and YUI]: Mindraven has a post sketching out how to start PHP background tasks using Thomas Sha’s YUI Connection Manager.
  
• Spanish Language Introductions to YUI on DesarrolloWeb.com: The team at DesarrolloWeb.com have put together a series of four Spanish-language articles introducting web developers to YUI, YUI 3, simple events, and adding/removing CSS classes in YUI.  Their YUI manual “pretende ofrecer una serie de artículos teóricos y prácticos de las librerías YUI, un framework Javascript y CSS.”
• Y! Search Engineer @bretts Writes About His Outside Events Gallery Module: Brett Stimmerman of Yahoo! Search dicsusses his new Outside Events module for the YUI 3 Gallery.  Outside Events “allows elements to subscribe to DOM events that occur outside of them. An event occurs outside the subscriber if the target it is not the subscriber itself, or any of the subscriber’s ancestors.” (Original source.)
  

How much did we miss? Let us know via @yuilibrary or in the comments below (if you’re feeling retro).

Stay tuned: Rey Bango from Ajaxian stopped by Yahoo yesterday and recorded a video interview with YUI engineers Luke Smith, Satyen Desai and Adam Moore. That session, plus a talk with BayJax event organizer Gonzalo Cordero, should be running on Ajaxian in the coming week.

Adam Granicz stopped by Yahoo! earlier this week to talk about the F# programming language and its use in web application development.

Granicz’s company, Intellifactory, produces the WebSharper platform. WebSharper fills the role in the F# community that GWT and similar tools fill in the Java community, promising a strongly typed, fast, tightly integrated development experience with deployment to rich web applications. As Fybit’s Riatrax4JS and yui4java do for Java developers, WebSharper brings the power of YUI 2 to F# developers, making a wide range of YUI widgets available.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

• Download HD video (480p ~572MB)
• Download video (m4v)

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

• Nicholas Zakas, Stoyan Stefanov, Ross Harmes, Julien Lecomte, Matt Sweeney: High Performance JavaScript — Five contributors to O’Reilly’s High Performance JavaScript discuss advanced JavaScript and DOM scripting optimizations at the April 2010 BayJax meetup at Yahoo.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Part 5: The End of All Things — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford concludes his five-part lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with a review of issues related to security and performance in JavaScript.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford continues his lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with an analysis of the Document Object Model (DOM) and an exploration of Ajax.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Act III: Function the Ultimate — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford continues his lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with a discussion of functions in JavaScript. ‘Functions are the very best part of JavaScript,’ Crockford says. ‘It’s where the power is, it’s where the beauty is.’ Watch the video to learn why.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford surveys the features of the JavaScript programming language.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Volume 1: The Early Years — Douglas Crockford puts the JavaScript programming language in its proper historical context, tracing the language’s structure and conventions (and some of its quirks) back to their roots in the early decades of computer science.

Subscribing to YUI Theater:

• YUI Theater RSS feed
• YUI Theater on iTunes

Financial industry reform is getting lots of attention these days. Many of the issues in the debate may seem distant, partisan, or confusing, but the idea of protecting a consumer’s personal finances hits close to home for each of us.

 Are you looking for some personal finance reform? Start by monitoring your investments and budget, current mortgage-rate data, and business news that is relevant to your situation. These possible additions to your My Yahoo! page can help:

• Stock Portfolio: See how your investments are performing by the minute.
• Yahoo! News – Personal Finance News: Keep tabs on market updates and practical news that affect your bottom line.
• Budget by Mint.com: This handy tool allows you to monitor a budget and track your spending, among other applications.
• Bankrate.com – Mortgages Blog: Get commentary and tips on what to watch for when it comes to financing your home.

 When your money matters are under control and monitored regularly, you’ll be in better shape to handle whatever bumps the economy — and the financial industry — may throw your way.

 Apps mentioned in this post:

• Add Stock Portfolio
• Add Yahoo! News – Personal Finance News
• Add Budget by Mint.com
• Add Bankrate.com – Mortgages Blog

 Tom
- My Yahoo! Editorial

On April 8, 2010, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft submitted the WOFF File Format 1.0 specification to the W3C. The submission was published on Monday, April 19 at http://www.w3.org/Submission/2010/03/.

Browser vendors and a growing number of type foundries now agree on a common encoding format for web fonts, thus closing an era of cross-browser incompatibility that began when IE4 and Netscape 4 first added support for downloadable fonts in 1997.

At the time, both Microsoft and Netscape implemented incompatible proprietary solutions. Netscape supported and later dropped Bitstream’s Portable Font Resource (PFR) format.  Internet Explorer’s Embedded Open Type (EOT) supported the sub-setting and compression of fonts, as well as the definition of the origin policy for the font resource within the EOT file itself. Some font vendors have licensed their fonts for web use under EOT.

Ten years later, Apple added support for raw font linking to WebKit and Safari, allowing web authors to refer to raw TrueType or OpenType font files from their CSS stylesheets. Firefox and Opera followed but use of the feature was in practice limited to free fonts and specialist font obfuscation services like Typekit as font vendors were extremely reluctant to allow their intellectual property to be posted as-is on web servers. The typically large size of font files and the challenges involved in compressing HTTP responses for all users added practical challenges.

In March 2008, Microsoft submitted EOT for standardization to the W3C. Despite a large existing EOT-compatible IE installed base, a number of issues prevented consensus from emerging on the suitability of Microsoft’s format as a web font standard. At the W3C’s Technical Plenary that year, Microsoft indicated that a solution type foundries were comfortable with was essential to maximize author choice. In the summer of last year, such a solution emerged from a proposal by type designers Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland and Mozilla’s Jonathan Kew. The Web Open Font Format (WOFF) - an open, compressed encoding for sfnt-based font resources - was born.

The new format’s specification is a deliverable of the newly chartered Fonts Working Group on which browser vendors, type foundries and designers are represented. We are excited by some of the initial feedback to this announcement and look forward to contributing to the Working Group to advance the state of web font interoperability.

Sylvain Galineau
Program Manger

Update 5:25pm: small edits for clarity in the third paragraph.