When you are creating a web page it’s common to cut and paste JavaScript functions, libraries or plugins from many different places. These plugins and libraries could quite easily have declared variables that conflict with each other and cause bugs and errors. In most programming languages we deal with this problem by using namespaces. Namespaces allow us to declare different pieces of code and give them a unique name in our application.

JavaScript does not have a formal way to declare a Namespace, but over the years many approaches have been developed to fix this problem and avoid conflicts.

On ScriptJunkie this week there’s a great article by Angus Croll who is a front end developer at Twitter which talks about the approach he takes to namespacing in JavaScript. It’s an essential read for anyone that wants to develop JavaScript or create plugins for libraries like jQuery.

• Visit ScriptJunkie to read Angus Croll’s Article

At the recent Web Directions conference we had a stand made of White Boards and invited attendees to share their comments, feedback and questions. Of course we wanted to respond to those questions – so here’s our feedback!

Q. Give us XP support please! (Many people asked this, including whether we can upgrade XP to support IE9 features)

A. Sorry, we had lots of people asking for IE9 compatibility with XP as lots of people are still stuck with it, but it’s still a ‘no’. One of the reasons is a pretty straight forward technical challenge – which is that IE9 uses DirectWrite & Direct2D in DirectX 11, which is available in Windows 7 & Windows Vista.

Q. Give us  <canvas> support please!

A. As if by magic, this is done! Yes, it’s in the IE9 Platform Preview 3

Q. ES5 in IE9 please!

A. Done, it’s in the IE9 Platform Preview 3

Q. Will Silverlight tools be able to export SVG and HTML, as they’re actually very compatible?

A. On 7^th June we released Expression Studio 4 and the Silverlight tools work with XAML… so no SVG in there yet.

Q. Does IE9 support all the modules related to CSS3?

A. The CSS working group has categorized areas from low to high priority & the specifications are at different stages from working draft through to recommendation, so ‘all’ is very difficult to say – at some point we need to ship .  Here are the modules that are supported in IE9 right now (see them in the release notes)…

• Media Queries
• Borders and Backgrounds
• Selectors
• Fonts
• Namespaces
• Color (rgba, opacity)
• Values and Units
• Opacity

Q. Can we do what the Mac does and take a website and make it an application? Then we could do that with IE6…

A. This is something we’re looking at – will keep you updated!

Q. Can we have more improvements in the developer tools in IE – there are still some things I prefer in firebug?

A. The ‘F12’ developer tools have improved further from IE8 to IE9 and include the following features:

• Network inspection
• JavaScript profiling
• UA String Picker
• Console Tab
• SVG Support

Please try it out and give us your feedback!

Q. Let <video> play anything WMP can – and WEBM!

A. <video> (and <audio>) are supported in IE9 Platform Preview 3 and we’ll play H.264 – and if it’s installed we’ll use WebM VP8 too.  Here’s our public statement.

Thanks to everyone for raising these questions – please keep them coming!

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Interesting post on the Template Monster blog about the proposed new HTML5 tags, even reminiscing about some of the tags we have to say goodbye to.

The closing paragraph sums up neatly;

“Again – what we’re trying to say is that, as cool as HTML5 looks and feels, it takes a lot of efforts and a little bit of witchcraft to forecast what the web is going to be all about within the next 5 years or so. Today these new tags and semantics approach really do look awesome and we totally love it, let’s just not forget that things have changed in order for us to be able to take advantage of them, the new features have to be used by us, the huge web community – that’s the only way for something that’s simply new to become new and useful.”

So true of many things beyond HTML5. It’s tough to see the future but at least participating gives you an element of control.

[Image courtesy of tantek]