Graceful Exits

Or, how I learned to stop parsing and love the soup

If you’re here, then you probably came from here, and you want to make Javascript more functional. If you didn’t come from there—and this is getting a bit like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, isn’t it?—then you might want to go there first, to see if you want to be here.
So: functional Javascript. Not just functional, but [...]

There are three main technologies that your browser employs to present HTML for you: XSL, CSS and Javascript. The first two of these are functional: that is, they turn your incoming (X)HTML documents into a set of functions, or behaviours if you like. Because CSS isn’t generally considered a language, let alone a functional one, [...]

Steve compares “graceful degradation” with “progressive enhancement.” Mostly he takes issue (rightly) with the rhetorical spin that the former applies to the idea of building a website. But I think you can compare them with each other as if they were two different types of crowbar instead: two ways of prising open the task in [...]

Sick and tired of getting a million hits, all to the same page, which more often than not hasn’t been updated in the mean time? Want to reduce your bandwidth and server-time loads without necessarily impairing your visitors’ experience of your site?
If you haven’t ever had cause to use it, there’s a standard called ETag [...]

Elliotte Rusty Harold roundly disses microformats, comparing the practice of utilising them to homeopathy, of all “disciplines.” A bit of cheeky banter, so it’s probably churlish to point out that the comparison itself turns out to be unsound within his own argument: whereas homeopathy might arguably be no solution to any problem, Elliotte’s beef [...]