One of my favorite new APIs that has been beaten about is setImmediate(). While I’ll concede the naming is completely wrong, the functionality is completely awesome. The basic idea is to tell the browser that you want some JavaScript code executed after the last UI task in the event loop completes. To put it more... […]

This past week, Microsoft officially unveiled the first preview of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 8.11. Doing so put to rest a whirlwind of rumors based on leaked versions of the much-maligned web browser. We now know some very important details about Internet Explorer 11, including its support for WebGL, prefetch, prerender, flexbox, mutation observers,... […]

In all of JavaScript, I’m not sure there is a more maligned piece than eval(). This simple function designed to execute a string as JavaScript code has been the more source of more scrutiny and misunderstanding during the course of my career than nearly anything else. The phrase “eval() is evil” is most often attributed... […]

There has recently been a renewed focus on what I’ve come to call the anti-convention movement in JavaScript. It seems like once or twice a year, someone either does a talk or writes an article saying that all of the things so-called JavaScript experts tell you are wrong and you should do whatever you want.... […]

Recently I asked engineers to share their experiences working with GitHub at companies. I’ve always used GitHub for open source projects, but I was interested in learning more about using it professionally and how one’s development workflow might change given all of GitHub’s capabilities. I set up a gist1 so people could leave the answers... […]

When Google announced that it was forking WebKit into Blink, there was a lot of discussion around what this would mean for web developers, and if the WebKit monoculture was truly breaking or not. Amongst the consternation and hypotheticizing was a detail that went overlooked by many: Blink’s plan to stop creating new vendor prefixes.... […]

Dealing with iframes is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you get sandboxing of content within another page, ensuring that JavaScript and CSS from one page won’t affect another. If the iframe is displayed a page from a different origin then you can also be assured that the page can’t do anything nefarious... […]

Last week, Pamela Fox tweeted a question to me: @slicknet Do you know the best way to make a that just has an icon accessible? title, aria-label, hidden text? </p> — Pamela Fox (@pamelafox) March 26, 2013 </blockquote>   As tends to happen on Twitter, we fruitlessly exchanged 140 character messages trying to get some... […]

Over the past few days, people have been going a little crazy over the announcement of the Internet Explorer 11 user-agent string. User-agent string announcements are typically met with a keen eye as we are still horribly tied to user-agent sniffing on servers around the world. And so when some beta testers leaked an Internet... […]

Around this time every year, companies start doing their annual reviews. Coincidentally, software engineers start wondering what their peers and managers will be saying about them. Throughout my career I’ve always watched as colleagues worried about the results of their annual review. Will they get that promotion? Will they get that raise? Or will they... […]