Today in the office we had another micro-debate about the usefulness of distinguishing between the terms progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. I am in the progressive enhancement camp but don’t really care all that much. I think I just like arguing.
Anyway, here’s an article on the subject: Understanding Progressive Enhancement. I think it summarises things pretty well. M&Ms explain everything don’t they?
Quick shout out to alert readers that the Fontis WYSIWYG is now available. Download it here.
Super Mario in 14kB Javascript. Very impressive little browser game that recreates some of the first Super Mario game.
I have recently been doing quite a bit of development with both ExtJS and jQuery and I thought I would share my experiences with both of them. One thing to keep in mind is that I’m not going to say whether one is really good or bad – they’re both excellent libraries and your choice for any given project might simply come down to personal preference. That said, the rest of this will be my opinion on the two.
Some good news from browser makers today to put a cap on a great year for browser development and innovation.
CouchDB is a (relatively) new database option for development that focuses on documents, rather than generic relational systems like most databases do. I think the concept is appealing and support for things like automatic versioning and distributed processing and storage could mean a lot fewer headaches that trying to get a custom system going yourself. Also interesting is the JSON storage format, which would make this ideal to use in many asynchronous web applications as the data returned can be used straight away on the browser.
I haven’t had any cause to use this system yet but I’ll be sure to write a review when I do. Anyone else taken this for a spin?