Hi everybody. As this month draws to a close, I realise it’s been about 45 days since I posted last. Enough is enough; it’s time I get this blog going again. So, I figured I’d kick it off again with a review of my activities over the last month and a half, and hopefully explain where I’ve been all this time.

In the second last week of July, from the 18th to the 22nd, I enjoyed a wonderful week of skiing the slopes at Perisher. It’d been 2 years since I’d skied last, but after just a bit of a wobbly start, I was up and going again like a pro! Well, not quite; but I did manage to make my way down most of the blue and black runs, even if it did involve a fair bit of falling.

As well as skiing, I managed to build my first snowman. It was quite an achievement for a first effort, at just over 1/2 a metre tall (approx. 2 feet). This was later followed by a second attempt at the end of the week, over twice the height of the first. I’d post some photos to show you, but I don’t have them with me; maybe another time, if I remember.

Following the ski trip, I finally made an appointment to get my eyes tested. I figured, since I was having trouble reading the menu board at McDonalds, it was time to get them checked. Well, it turned out I needed glasses and I am really surprised at the improved eye sight they’ve given me. Watching TV no longer involves moving closer and/or squinting at the screen and even looking at a computer monitor all day is easier.

It’s been about 2 months since I started working full time at HotHouse as a web developer, primarily writing HTML, CSS and occasionally, a little bit of JavaScript. I am enjoying working there a lot and, in fact, the first site I built from scratch while working there will be launching very shortly; I’ll give more details when it does.

Over the past 2 weeks, I’ve been putting in a lot of effort toward a more personal project involving a lot of JavaScript. I’m actually helping out Eric Meyer by going through his world famous S5 script, cleaning it up, pulling it apart, rewriting and restructuring entire sections of it making it completely object-oriented.

You can take a look at my current work, browse through the scripts and see a functioning Slide() object that can show, hide, increment and decrement slides. It’s been tested in Firefox, Opera and IE. Let me know if you find any issues with any other browser, particularly Mac and Linux browsers. If you can suggest a fix for any problems, that would be even better.

One of the design goals of this project is to fix all the issues that prevent the script from functioning in Opera without having to fallback to OperaShow, as well as making it more modular and easier to extend with new features and functionality. Another design goal is to actually make the script work for real XHTML served as XML (not just tag-soup served as text/html), with namespace support (including mixed namespace documents).

In fact, the document.getElementsByClassName() and related functions I wrote for this already support XHTML, SVG and MathML namespaces. (There are some issues with the Element.addClassName() and Element.removeClassName() functions relating to the case-insensitivity of HTML and case-sensitivity of XML, but I’ll write and publish the fixes for those later – it’s easy to fix, I just have to find the time to do it).