JAVASCRIPT
The Wonders of Duck Typing
Having immersed myself entirely in JavaScript for the past few years, going back to something like C# should have been a bit of relief. However, it mainly served to highlight just how inflexible and full of unnecessary overhead C# is, and just how much I love the flexibility and interoperability of JavaScript. This particular post details one of those ridiculous situations that languages like C# often create, with a relatively simple app containing at least 6 different classes/structures for storing 3D position data, many of them pretty much the same but entirely incompatible with each other.
Web Experiments
PerformativeDesign.com has gone into a short code-freeze for some external testing now so I have finally got a bit of time to catch my breath. As part of that work, I have had to do quite a few small experiments and proofs-of-concept, just as a way of seeing what was possible and then working out the best ways to do various things. Some of these were a bit interesting and often a lot of fun so I thought I'd polish up a few and make them available as a small taster of things to come, hopefully quite soon.
Browser Detection Methods
Whilst there may be many reasons for wanting to know which browser your web page is being viewed within, the main one I find is needing to tweak some CSS or embedded applet code to accommodate certain rendering inconsistencies. At first glance, this seems pretty easy with dynamically-generated pages as most server-side programming or scripting languages provide a way of doing this as the page is being assembled for delivery. However, for both static web pages and content that is likely to be cached by a content management system (CMS) it isn't so easy. This article therefore considers a range of available browser detection methods.