By R. Mark Volkmann The JavaScript language is defined by the ECMAScript specification, also known as ECMA-262. ECMAScript 6 (ES6) defines the next version of JavaScript. ECMA Technical Committee 39 (TC39) has a goal to complete the ES6 specification by the end of 2014. The current draft state of the specification can be viewed at harmony: […]
Improving Browser Detection
By Ryan Morr Despite the progress client-side scripting has made over the last decade or so, it seems that some bad practices are poised to never die. With the medium transitioning into a more mobile-centric world in recent years, an influx in bugs has many developers turning back to browser detection for a solution. History […]
Introduction to npm
By Toby Ho npm is the granddaddy of JavaScript package managers. It is the beloved package manager for Node. It hosts over 64 thousand modules and counting. Based on data at modulecounts.com - npm is by far the fastest growing package manager, that’s is compared to Ruby Gems, CPAN, PyPI, Maven plus a few others. […]
Creating Sound with the Web Audio API and Oscillators
By Brian Rinaldi Typically, the web is a purely visual medium, but audio can be an important part of creating great user experiences - and not just in games. The judicious use of audio can offer the user valuable feedback and context. For example, we’re used to desktop applications giving audio feedback when a new […]
String Templating Considered Harmful
By Rich Harris If you’re been programming for any length of time, you’ve probably read your fair share of ‘Considered Harmful‘ essays, and thus already know that what follows the headline is usually a stream of biased remarks and cherry-picked evidence. I can’t promise this will be any different. But the concepts we’re going to […]
Using Media Queries in JavaScript
By Krasimir Tsonev If you practice responsive design then you use a lot of media queries. Media Queries are a CSS feature that gives designers the power to add something like if statements. By this I mean that it allows you to apply rules only if the current page meets certain conditions. In this article […]
Creating Modular View Components with React and Grunt
By Simon Smith One of the libraries gaining a lot of interest recently is Facebook’s React JS library. It mainly concerns itself with “the V in MVC” and encourages developers to break their app into resuable, modular components. The Virtual DOM is a great feature on its own, and I encourage you to investigate React […]
Is jQuery Too Big For Mobile?
By TJ Van Toll This question gets asked a lot, and I’ve yet to see a data-based exploration of this topic. Terms like “big” and “bloated” are relative terms; they don’t mean anything without numbers to back them up. The real question should be - “Does the size of jQuery adversely affect the users of […]
Improving Speech Recognition in the Browser
By Guy Levy It seems like the future is all about talking to your devices, whether it is a your smart-phone,game console, TV, Google Glass or plain old PC. We even have a Web Speech API in the browser that gives web developers access to speech recognition. Still, there is a small problem: the speech […]
A DOM Manipulation Class in 100 Lines of JavaScript
By Krasimir Tsonev If you build web applications you probably deal with the DOM a lot. Accessing and manipulating DOM elements is a common requiement of nearly every web application. Very often we collect information from different controls, we need to set values, change the content of div or span tags. Of course there are […]