Simon Willison blogs about how JQuery won him over. From its faddish start based around CSS selectors (getElementsBySelector), and method chaining, Simon now sees the library in a new light. Simon shows how jQuery supports modern development best practice such as namespaces, giving a quick nod to the richness of jQuery selectors (DOM, CSS and XPath). JQuery's event handling looks natural and offers an event when the dom is ready. It exposes custom events for non-trivial Ajax requests. Simon's so convinced about jQuery that he's willing to overlook his rule that developers should know how a library works before using it.
An online copy of O'Reilly's 2002 book Creating Applications with Mozilla. It focused on pre-1.0 versions of Mozilla, so details about the application structure has changed, but the XUL elements are relatively stable.
Christian Heilmann describes an approach to building complex web application by basing them around events, particularly around YUI's CustomEvent class.
Christian Heilmann's excellent guide to writing unobtrusive JavaScript. Takes the reader from the inline JavaScript world right through to a clean dynamically attached events with all the JavaScript code in external files. Covers DOM Scripting. This is the key reference to unobtrusive scripting.
Michael Mahemoff runs into a problem with Protypes $$ function when looking for class names. Its taking over 90 seconds when more than 100 matches are returned. The advice is: Avoid $$(".classname") on large DOMs.
Stuart Langridge provides unobtrusive JavaScript that makes HTML tables sortable by their table headers. To enhance a table to be sortable requires the addition of the classname sorttable
Christian Heilmann demonstrates delegating events, and compares it to the main alternative of assigning event handlers to each individual node. Its a technique that's important for writing applications that can scale.
Gez Lemon reviews Christian Heilmann's recently published book. Its a thumbs up, and recommended for developers working with standards and accessibility, regardless of their JavaScript level.
A useful overview / introduction of the jQuery library, covering using selectors and XPath expressions to target specific elements in a document, simple Ajax requests, the basic animations available, restructuring a document, creating jQuery plugins.
Mark Pilgrim's essential online book about developing Greasemonkey scripts. Excellent starting point for Greasemonkey developers. Covers everything from setting up a Greasemonkey scripts to common DOM coding idioms, as well as a brief rundown of XPath, and case studies of Greasemonkey scripts.
Mark Pilgrim dissects the security issues of the 0.3 Greasemonkey, and describes how the new architecture of Greasemonkey works, pointing out pitfalls and how to address them.
Speeding up object detection by doing the detection once. Dean Edwards demonstrates a quick improvement using the ubiquitous addEvent function.
Dean Edwards counters Dojo's Alex Russell's hideous hacks with two standards friendly approaches. Looking at the The DOM Content loaded problem and the sluggishness of walking a DOM Tree, Dean talks about speed improvements, including the use of XPaths.