Easy! Reader

In his most recent essay, Gerry McGovern was discussing expert opinions and voices. One particular comment he made struck a chord:

The Web is maturing. It needs more people like Jakob Nielsen who propose, explain and defend rules.

Now you can say what you will about Jakob, but I think the sentiment is right. I also think that priase needs to be spread a little farther to include Molly, Eric, Jeffrey and the countless other standards evangelists (both internationally renown and sitting in the cube next to you) who feel it is their calling to enforce the "rules" of the web. These are people who truly believe, as I do, that constraints are necessary for creativity. Jason Fried mentioned something similar in his discussion of Basecamp (and I am probably paraphrasing):

Limited time, limited people, limited funding… they make you creative

I think the same could be said for embracing web standards. I mean look at the Zen Garden, the Web Standards Awards, etc. There is some amazingly creative work out there that embraces the "restrictions" of web standards. Frankly, I think that web standards are the main reason DOM scripting (and all that comes with it) has been able to flourish: standards ensure a solid platform upon which to build anything. Their constraints free you to get creative and really make something new.

So let's hear it for them: a round of applause for all of the standards evangelists out there. Keep up the great work, we appreciate all that you do.

The reception for our latest script release, jsTrace, has been fantastic. From the write-up on the DOM Scripting Task Force blog to all of the emails and comments. It was great.

The past few days have seen many ideas, requests and enhancements sent my way. Some have been rolled into the jsTrace 1.1 release which I made public today. One such enhancement (brought to us by Joe Shelby) I have dubbed "memory," as it allows the debugging window to remember both its position and size the next time it is opened (via cookies). Further enhancements have been made to the underlying code to streamline development of additional tools for the bottom toolbar and the font size of the bottom toolbar has also been increased (per several requests).

I hope you all enjoy the improvements. Keep 'em coming.

Update: We've also been mentioned in DOMScripting.com.

Another update (to 1.2): I added a buffer to handle traces executed prior to the jsTrace window being generated. The buffer is written to the viewport once it is generated.

Like many of you, I'm sure, I hate debugging JavaScript. Really, it's not the debugging, per se, as much as it's using alert() to echo stuff out to the screen. It's stupid and distracting and takes for ever if you're debugging a lot of stuff.

For the last few months, I've been toying with a few different means of error reporting and echoing out debugging information, but hadn't been really satisfied with anything I'd come up with. I used to do quite a bit of Flash work back in the day (before Dave came along and put my best efforts to shame) and always loved the Trace window. I liked that you could just echo stuff out to it and it acted as a running tally of pretty much anything you wanted to track: variable values, messages, etc. Two days ago I decided that was what I wanted for JavaScript.

I toyed with the idea of spawning a popup and tracing the info to that, but I don't like popups. They are possibly more annoying than alert messages (well… maybe not). I decided to echo the messages out to a div on the page instead. Then feature creep set in. Before I knew it, it was a draggable, scalable window with some nifty features. Never one to be selfish, I thought other people could find a use for it too, so I've released it for anyone who wants it: here it is. Use it, play with it and improve on it as you see fit.

The script currently has the following features:

• the window drags & scales,
• you can output a delimeter quickly to help further organize your tracing,
• you can quickly clear the window,
• the system is very easy to implement (even for a novice DOM scripter), and
• it's easily removable once your debugging is complete.

Special thanks go out to Aaron Boodman, whose DOM Drag was perfect for the dragging and enabled me to hook up a window stretcher pretty easily, Richard Rutter, whose Browser Stickies were also somewhat of an inspiration, and Dave, for helping me debug the scaling code.

Aside: one nice feature of the script is that, once it was operational, I was able to use it to debug itself… how cool is that?