McArthur GFX

There's a couple ways you can define globally accessible variables in Javascript. And it turns out that in JScript, they actually mean different things (as opposed to all other implementations, where they're the same). This meant my GetClass implementation just plain wouldn't work for Internet Explorer. Well, that's no good, since that's a basic building block of my MooTools MVC framework. Now, I could require all classes be created explicitly, like window.Task, but that makes for a very inflexible pattern. And there's no reasonable way to explain to users why I'm requiring that.

So instead, I delved into JScript to find a way to let me iterate all global variables.

I've updated MGFX.Tabs to have a random slide function. It just uses Math.random, and a slight modifier to insure the random number isn't already the current index. Since I believe in semantic versioning, and this is a feature update (not a bug fix), but not breaking, its should be a new minor version.

var tabs = new MGFX.Tabs($$('.tabs li a'), $$('.tabs .content'));
tabs.random();

We've already learned that to make our Javascript load faster, we should be listening for a domready event instead othe window onload event. However, sometimes, you can actually make too much Javascript reliant on that sacred event. And when you do that, you can get quite the jump or flicker in older browsers.

We use a proprietary text replacement program instead of sIFR or Cufon or anything else out there. We call it Typostream. On one of my recent projects, we had several features of the web-site requiring extra Javascript functionality, along with a good portion of text being replaced. Originally, I had all of this Javascript being executed on DOM ready event, as best practices recommend. However, viewing the site in Internet Explorer revealed some amazingly laggy results.

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