Earth is really full of things.
— The King of All Cosmos, in Katamari Damacy
It’s New Year’s Eve, and I didn’t play as much Katamari Damacy or World of Warcraft over the holiday break as I wanted. I was working on this end of the year post.
Here’s my stab at a ‘best of the web’ for 2004:
Articles on Web Development
I ended up writing plenty of JavaScript this year, so the blog posts and articles I appreciated reflect that:
- Separating Behavior and Structure
- Peter-Paul Koch’s article on using late binding with JavaScript changed how I write it. The key: don’t embedd JavaScript in the page. Use the JavaScript DOM API to attach the
onclickand other event driven controls after the page loads. - Closures and executing JavaScript on page load
- Simon Willison wrote an introduction to closures, showing how and why to use them when implementing Peter-Paul Koch’s late binding techniques.
- Zebra Tables
- Peter F. Miller’s ALA article on ’striping’ tables demonstrates Peter-Paul’s technique nicely.
- Semantic XHTML
- Kevin Marks and Tantek Çelik’s presentation on using XHTML ‘to show what you mean’ changes how I write markup.
- Tinderbox Category Factory
- One reason I may well just switch this blog to Tinderbox. Doug Miller’s awesome hack from the San Francisco Tinderbox weekend.
Other Web Writing
- Ikeaphobia and its discontents
- Adam Greenfield’s defense of the popularization of Scandanavian furnishings, and coffee that doesn’t taste of soap.
- Namarie Sue
- It’s from last December, but I must include Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s guided tour through the wilds of authorial self-insertion.
- Adbuster’s Fables of the Reconstruction
- Worldchanging’s criticism of fantasies where you destroy civilization in order to save it (after all, it certainly isn’t helping Iraq.)
- The Elitism of Despair
- Bellatrys’ letter to the Fabians
- Superlegitimacy: passion and ecstasy of a Tokyo train driver
- Nick Currie on Japan’s superficial resemblence to the West
My own favorite entries
- We may be on the verge of nothing important
- Bruce Sterling’s Long Now Foundation Talk on The Singularity
- Lossless XHTML
- My notes on Tantek and Kevin’s talk mentioned above.
- Really, Catalogs Matter
- My misadventures with XML Catalogs and PHP 4’s DOMXML extension.
The neatest web thing: autocompletion with the XMLHTTPRequest object.
- First seen on Bitflux’s weblog.
- Then Google got in on the act.
- And more implementations pop up.
And here’s some other things I liked:
Media
- Bebel Gilberto
- Franz Ferdinand
- DJ McSleazy’s Mashup of the Beastie Boys and Franz Ferdinand
- Last Exile
- Haibane Renmei
- Shawn of the Dead
- The Incredibles
- The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Funny Stuff
- Katamari Damacy
- Fafblog
- Shrillblog
- PvP
- Megatokyo
My best wishes for a happy and better 2005. I thank you for reading this old weblog.
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