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At the start of this year, I sat down to write the "Errors and Debugging" chapter of Simply JavaScript. I cracked my fingers, dove into the landscape of JavaScript debugging tools, and emerged very disappointed several hours later. At the time, Firefox was the only browser with a JavaScript debugging tool worth writing about: Firebug. Less than a year later, the landscape has changed dramatically. Every major browser has introduced new development tools that make it easier to diagnose problems with your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code right inside the browser in question. But can any of these tools stack up against the slick and effortlessly powerful tools provided by Firebug? Let's take a look.

I have revisited adding Yui compressor into my work's ant build script to minify JS and CSS scripts. The current jar was yuicompressor-2.3.5.jar . It took a lot of playing around but I finally stumbled on how to get it to work. Here is the snippet for the yuicompressor. I had to jump through a couple hoops like overriding the current js/css scripts with the optimized js/css scripts. I'll release a full working copy in a zip, you can run against your webroot. We achieved an average 18% compression rate for all our js/css files.

Response to marbux comments.

# See also my comment on the same web page that explains why HTML 5 is NOT it for document exchange between web editing applications. . - comment by marbux # Response to marbux supporting the WebKit layout/document model. Marbux argues that HTML5 is not interoperable, and CSS2 near useless. HTML5 fails regarding the the interop web appplications need. I respond by arguing that the only way to look at web applications is to consider that the browser layout engine is the web application layout engine! Web applications are actually written to the browser layout/document model, OR, to take advantage of browser plug-in capabilities. The interoperability marbux seeks is tied directly to the browser layout engine. In this context, the web format is simply a reflection of that layout engine. If there's an interop problem, it comes from browser madness differentials. The good news is that there are all kinds of efforts to close the browser gap: including WHATWG - HTML5, CSS3, W3C DOM, JavaScript Libraries, Google GWT (Java to JavaScript), Yahoo GUI, and the my favorite; WebKit. The bad news is that the clock is ticking. Microsoft has pulled the trigger and the great migration of MSOffice client/server systems to the MS WebSTack-Mesh architecture has begun. Key to this transition are the WPF-.NET proprietary formats, protocols and interfaces such as XAML, Silverlight, LINQ, and Smart Tags. New business processes are being written, and old legacy desktop bound processes are being transitioned to this emerging platform. The fight for the Open Web is on, with Microsoft threatening to transtion their entire business desktop monopoly to a Web platform they own. The Web is going to be broken. There is no way of stopping Microsoft at this point. What we can do though is focus on Open Web solutions that are worthy alternatives to Microsoft's proprietary push. For me, this means the WebKit layout/document model supported by Apple, Adobe and Google. ~ge~

A CMS expert argues for HTML over XHTML, explaining his reasons for switching. Excellent read! He nails the basics. for similar reasons, we moved from ODF to ePUB and then to CDf and finally to the advanced WebKit document model, where wikiWORD will make it's stand.

SoundManager 2 lets web developers load, play and control sounds via Javascript. SM2 is an attempt at providing the sound API which Javascript has been missing. It's a library which wraps and extends Flash's sound capabilities, bringing cross-platform audio functionality to Javascript.

MOO.RD - A lightweight Mootools extension

moo.rd is a super lightweight javascript (object oriented) library based on the MooTools framework. It is designed to give many useful and powerful functionalities to the developers, like a lot of effects, customizable standards, utility native functions, table management, virtual boxes and many more. In addiction moo.rd is modular, flexible, and completely compatible with all MooTools plug-in.

very nice extended image gallery system based on prototype

WireIt is an open-source javascript library to create web wirable interfaces for dataflow applications, visual programming languages or graphical modeling.

Nowadays many JavaScripters are aware of the advantages of event delegation. Chris Heilmann and Dan Webb, among others, have discussed its advantages, and I've been using it as much as possible for about two years now. Event delegation is especially useful in effects like dropdown menus, where lots of events on links may take place that can easily be handled at the root level (an or in this case).

collection of javascripts based on mootools

very nice fish eye image gallery system based on mootools

It's really amazing to see what one can create using jQuery. Developers just don't stop making incredibly interactive web applications every now and then. This post just demonstrates excellent examples of some of the best jQuery plugins out there. You can also take a look at the other jQuery Plugins in this series : * 45+ Fresh Out of the oven jQuery Plugins * 50+ Amazing Jquery Examples- Part1

article about events in web application design

Accessible data visualization in HTML has always been tricky to achieve, particularly because elements such as images allow only the most basic features for providing textual information to non-visual users. A while back, we wrote an article describing a technique we came up with to use JavaScript to scrape data from an HTML table and generate charts using the HTML 5 Canvas element. The technique is particularly useful because the data for the visualization already exists in the page in structured tabular format, making it accessible to people who browse the web with a screen reader or other assistive technology.

MySpace's Performance Tracker is a browser plugin that help developers to improve their code performance by capturing and measuring possible bottlenecks on their web pages.