Got to get rid of some of these tabs

I’ve got 65 tabs open in Firefox right now. Five years from now, that will seem like a light sprinkling of web dust. Right now, it’s excessive. Time to dump some links:

JavaScript

• Anonymous functions, parentheses, scoping, and closures: Peter Michaux – “An Important Pair of Parens.” John Resig – “Using (function(){})(),” a chapter from John’s forthcoming book, Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja (courtesy of Ajaxian)
• Stoyan Stefanov – “Non-blocking JavaScript Downloads“
• Version 3 of the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is on the way. Breaking changes ahead – take note now.
• If you’re using the Yahoo! CDN to serve up the YUI files for your project, make sure that you use the combo handler service to group the files into a single HTTP call.
• The conflict between the two camps trying to push JavaScript forward has been resolved. The result is “Harmony.” Comments by John Resig, Douglas Crockford, Alex Russell, Brendan Eich.

CSS

• Are “variables” in CSS harmful? Bert Bos makes the argument, Alex Russell destroys it comprehensively.

Browsers

• 37Signals to phase out support for IE6. Given its industry position, 37Signals is a company that can get away with this move. For most of us, though, IE6 is still very much a painful reality. An announcement like this provides a hopeful glimpse of the future, but my own prediction is that after IE8 comes along IE7 will be dead and forgotten before IE6.
• Hallvord R. M. Steen – “A browser sniffing warning: The trouble with Acid3 and TinyMCE” (on dev.opera.com). Browser detection is bad. Hallvord describes the bug detection technique in this article. See also Hallvord’s earlier article “Using capability detection“, and PPK’s “Object detection.”
• Firefox 3.1 is going to run JavaScript much faster: “The birth of a faster monkey”

(With all the improvements going into JavaScript and browsers, client-side development is a great and interesting place to be right now, and the future is looking even better.)

User Experience

• Bill Scott – “Anti-pattern: animation gone wild“
• Jeff Patton – “12 Best Practices for UX in an Agile Environment” part 1, part 2 (UIE)
• Lisa Herrod – “Deafness and the User Experience” (A List Apart)
• Ryan Singer (37Signals) – “Learning from bad UI.”
• Mark Boulton – “Don’t screw with conventions“

“Mainstream Users”

• Jeremy Zawodny – “The Truth about Web Navigation.”
• Marshall Kirkpatrick – “Will Mainstream Users Ever Learn About The Browser’s Address Bar?“
• Case study 1: What happens when you rank highly in Google for the phrase “Typing for Dollars.” Read the comments following the article on the page.
• Case study 2: What happens when you rank highly for the phrase “cancel Google.” Read the comments. (Surely some of them must be taking the piss.)

Software development, sexism therein

Note: this is one of my hot buttons. When it comes to gender equality, software development is struggling to come out of the dark ages. What’s worse, though, is that with a few notable exceptions (see below) it isn’t struggling very hard.

• Emma Jane Hogbin – “Form an orderly queue, ladies” (video presentation) (Also: notes)
• Alex Russell – “The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles?“
• Charlie Stross – “Bechdel’s Law,” and “Bechdel test round-up.” (Not software development, but related.)

Conferences

• Jeremy Keith liveblogged large chunks of the An Event Apart 08 conference in San Francisco last week. Awesome work.

Business

• Steve Yegge – “Done, and gets things smart.” An alternative to Spolsky’s “Smart, and gets things done.”
• David Weiss – “Finishers Wanted“
• Matt Linderman (37Signals) – “Domenico DeMarco and pizza as art.”

Travel

• Edward Hasbrouck (The Practical Nomad) – “Foreigners now need USA permission to leave their home countries.” Over the last eight years, travel to the USA has become something to dread and fear, not to look forward to and enjoy.
• Skyscanner has just rolled out a new design and front-end architecture. Yes, I had a small hand in this. 🙂

Phew.