Calyptus Life

This is a follow up to my earlier post about the Reactive Extensions (Rx) for JavaScript by Microsoft’s DevLabs. This is also in response to Matthew Podwysocki’s post on jQuery integration (which deserves some credit for putting it out there).

I will assume some familiarity with Rx.

Just like any other DOM library, MooTools has a way of working with native and custom passive DOM events. We can easily give Element object and the Elements collection a method to provide these events as “Observables”. In the jQuery example the method name “ToObservable” was added to the jQuery object, accepting an event type parameter, which was my initial reaction as well. But I’m going to call mine getEvent as in “getting a stream of events given the event type“.

var observableFromEvent = function(type){
  var self = this;
  return Rx.Observable.Create(function(observer){
      var fn = function(event){
          observer.OnNext(event);
      };
      self.addEvent(type, fn);
      return function(){
        self.removeEvent(type, fn);
      };
  });
};
 
Window.implement('getEvent', observableFromEvent);
Document.implement('getEvent', observableFromEvent);
Element.implement('getEvent', observableFromEvent);
Elements.implement('getEvent', observableFromEvent);

These are infinite Observables but we could also make .destroy() trigger onComplete to make them finite as well.

Flickables Example

Instead of the canonical Drag and Drop example I thought I show a twist. Let’s say we want to listen to a mouse flick. The mouse position have to move over 100px in 200ms. Then we want the angle of the flick.

var angleFromPosition = function(position, center){
    var diffX = position.x - center.x, diffY = position.y - center.y;
    var distance = Math.sqrt(diffX * diffX + diffY * diffY);
    var angle = Math.atan2(diffY + distance, diffX) * 360 / Math.PI;
    return { distance: distance, angle: angle };
};
 
var distanceReached = function(angle){ return angle.distance > 100; };
 
var timeLimit = Rx.Observable.Timer(200);
 
var mousePositions = document.getEvent('mousemove')
                     .Select(function(event){ return event.page; });
 
var flicks = document.getElements('.flickable')
             .getEvent('mousedown')
             .SelectMany(function(event){
                 return mousePositions
                     .Select(angleFromPosition.bindWithEvent(null, event.page))
                     .TakeUntil(document.getEvent('mouseup'))
                     .TakeUntil(timeLimit)
                     .Where(distanceReached)
                     .Take(1);
             });
 
// ...
 
flicks.Subscribe(function(current){
    console.log('Flicked in direction: ' + current.angle + '°');
});

Events Mixin

MooTools has a very strong benefit compared to many other libraries. The publish/subscribe pattern is made explicit even for custom classes, using the Events mixin. By implement our “getEvent” method on this class we can use Rx on all custom MooTools classes that provide passive events.

Events.implement('getEvent', observableFromEvent);

Side-effects

Rx allows for the act of subscribing to an event to trigger an action/side-effect. Think of the Request object for example. You can use the act of subscribing to it, to issue a HTTP request. Then we can turn the subsequent events like success and failure into the Observable interface. This means that Request is a complete Observable in it self. This is what I was saving the conversion name toObservable for.

Request.implement({
 
  toObservable: function(){
    var self = this;
    return Rx.Observable.create(function(observer){
 
      var listeners = {
 
        success: function(result){
          self.removeEvents(listeners);
          observer.OnNext(result);
          observer.OnCompleted();
        },
 
        cancel: function(){
          self.removeEvents(listeners);
          observer.OnCompleted();
        },
 
        failure: function(xhr){
          self.removeEvents(listeners);
          observer.OnError(xhr);
        }
 
      };
 
      if (!self.running || self.options.link == 'cancel'){
        self.addEvents(listeners).send();
        return function(){
          self.removeEvents(listeners).cancel();
        };
      }
 
      if (self.options.link == 'chain'){
        var disposed, running;
        self.chain(function(){
          running = true;
          if (!disposed) self.addEvents(listeners).send();
        });
        return function(){
          if (running) self.removeEvents(listeners).cancel();
          disposed = true;
        };
      }
 
      observer.OnComplete();
      return function(){};
 
    });
  }
 
});

This creates a finite stream of events – only one response to be exact. However, since the act of subscribing to it causes it to occur we can have it trigger repeatedly as part of a composite stream of events.

MooTools’ Fx provides a similar concept but slightly different. Even though we don’t get an event for each tick, we still get an asynchronous complete event. This means we can insert Fx as part of a composite stream of events.

Fx also requires from/to arguments to be passed at the start. So we add the option “defaultArgs” to allow us to pass those at initialization.

Fx.implement({
 
  toObservable: function(){
    var self = this;
    return Rx.Observable.create(function(observer){
 
      var listeners = {
 
        complete: function(){
          self.removeEvents(listeners);
          observer.OnCompleted();
        },
 
        cancel: function(){
          self.removeEvents(listeners);
          observer.OnCompleted();
        }
 
      };
 
      if (!self.running || self.options.link == 'cancel'){
        self.addEvents(listeners).start.run(self.options.defaultArgs, self);
        return function(){
          self.removeEvents(listeners).cancel();
        };
      }
 
      if (self.options.link == 'chain'){
        var disposed, running;
        self.chain(function(){
          running = true;
          if (!disposed)
            self.addEvents(listeners).start.run(self.options.defaultArgs, self);
        });
        return function(){
          if (running) self.removeEvents(listeners).cancel();
          disposed = true;
        };
      }
 
      observer.OnComplete();
      return function(){};
 
    });
  }
 
});

Of course since there are a lot of other classes extending the Request and Fx classes, you get the same benefits on them. This is one of the true benefits of MooTools’ modular extensibility.

That is one of the benefits of using the class(ical) pattern in JavaScript. More on that next time…

Side-effects Example

var popup = document.id('popup');
var showPopup = new Fx.Morph(popup, { property: 'opacity', defaultArgs: 1 });
var feed = new Request.JSON({ url: 'mydata.json', method: 'get' });
 
var showFeed = feed.toObservable()
               .Do(function(data){ popup.set('text', data); })
               .Concat(showPopup.toObservable());
 
// ...
 
showFeed.Subscribe(); // loads mydata.json into #popup and displays it

Using Arrays in Unit Tests

Since natives are allowed to be extended within the MooTools theorem, we can add a convenience method to turn an Array into an observable stream of content.

Array.implement('toObservable', function(){return Rx.Observable.FromArray(this);});

We can use this to fake the “flicks” event stream in our earlier example. We avoid having to include complex asynchronous tests or user action tests.

var flicks = [
               { angle: 0, distance: 100 },
               { angle: 45, distance: 100 },
               { angle: 90, distance: 100 }
             ]
             .toObservable();
 
// Unit tests
// Synchronously testing code that's depending on a flick event stream

Web Sockets and Web Workers

Now imagine this on a stream of events coming in from Web Sockets or Web Workers.

You could set up a web socket to asynchronously feed you JSON objects, and easily hook that up to the rest of you UI just as easily as the Request example above.

I’ve been following the work on the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) by Eric Meijer and others over at Microsoft. At first look I was intrigued but didn’t really understand the purpose of it. However, at a second look, I realized that it had the potential to solve every major problem I’ve had with advanced UI development in JavaScript.

Asynchronous Programming – Composable Events

Modern UI development forces us to use asynchronous patterns for user actions, animations and data load. But to make UI development easy you can think of each operation as sequential. You can even artificially lock down the user interface – by disabling or hiding UI elements – while an operation is occurring.

If you want to optimize your user experience, you will need to start dabble in the complicated art of event composition. The problem occurs when you have complex interactions that depend upon other interaction or state.

You can solve this using various state machine patterns. However, I think you will find it quite difficult at times. Even if you do solve it, it’s probably going to be for a specific purpose which is not easily generalizable nor extensible.

Various tools have tried using patterns like Futures and Promises. I think those patterns need to be applied at the language level to be really useful though.

Reactive Programming in an Object Oriented World

JavaScript has introduced the map/filter/reduce methods on arrays to allow collection operations using a sequenced composition of functions.

There’s one minor thing that JavaScript developers should note. In LINQ these operations are lazy iterables. The map/filter operations aren’t actually executed until an .each() starts iterating over them. This avoids having to create duplicates of the result in memory. It also means that the underlying array can change after we call filter and map. This is similar to “live” collections in the DOM. But they can also be infinite in length just like Mozilla’s Iterators. The .each() call is still essentially a synchronous operation though.

Erik Meijer and team simply decided to make that iteration execution asynchronous.

This means that the source data can be asynchronous. So instead of thinking of Events as independent, think of them as a stream of data with an unknown length… (or an asynchronous list/array).

This means that you can now apply the same type of function composition to streams of events. Enter the Reactive Extensions for .NET.

Supposedly this could solve the problem of Event composition in the UI space.

The Reactive Extensions for JavaScript

To my surprise, Matthew Podwysocki recently started a blog series about the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript (also Microsoft to be clear). Apparently the benefits of this tool in the JS world has not gone unnoticed.

There are no bits officially released yet. However, considering Matthew Podwysocki’s recent posts and Eric Meijer’s upcoming talk at the Mix conference… I wouldn’t be surprised if something was released at Mix on March 17th.

Learning More

I have since been interested in learning more about various alternative models. There’s a research project called Arrows which provides a different model that’s more purely functional. There’s also a framework called Flapjax which is more of a DOM library aiming to provide reactive concepts to JavaScript.

To learn more about the Reactive Extensions, take a look at the videos about the .NET version posted by the team over at Channel 9.

Concerns

I’m not sure the first implementation of the Reactive Extensions is going to be the one to solve all these problems.

I think that many developers will have a difficult time thinking about these concepts in the terms of event streams. That could make it difficult to use the current method naming. In this sense, I think Arrows might be easier to get started with. It will allow you to think about events as sequential operations. However, I also see benefit in the model employed by the Reactive Extensions, IF we can all wrap our heads around it.

Another issue is the “Let” method. This may be difficult to know when to use for many developers. That’s true even for LINQ. However, in the Reactive Extensions I have a feeling those issues will become even more prevalent. Hopefully there will be better syntactical sugar to solve this issue.

Rx has yet to prove itself in real world complex applications that goes well beyond single subscription examples. I may try to extend the canonical drag and drop examples to my own HTML5 based Drag and Drop model and plugins to stress test it.

Naming Conventions

There’s also the issue of upper camel case in method names. LINQ for JavaScript is also using this convention. I’m guessing they’re trying to be compatible. However, the JavaScript convention is to use lower camel case method names, which also the new ASP.NET AJAX library is doing. So I don’t understand why.

In dynamic languages with limited auto-completion (IntelliSense) support, naming conventions are very important to follow.

Although, I do like the names Select/Where/OrderBy better than map/filter/sort since given the arguments, that tends to read better as a grammatical sentence.

UPDATE: Event DSLs

I should mention that the MooTools 2.0 team has been working on a DSL based on the CSS selector syntax. This is an extension of the Element.Delegation plugin.

The idea is to use event names and pseudos in combination to create custom composite event listeners. This example would listen to the first click event:

element.addEvent('click:flash', firstClick);

This could enable a lot more powerful combinations of custom events. However, it doesn’t enable passing of parameters and the composability of Rx and Arrows.

I was researching various options of traversing nodes for Slick and the DOM Range for MooTools. I realized that the nodeName property is incredibly slow to access in WebKit browsers. This is because it is working with qualified names (with namespaces and stuff) internally.

if (node.nodeName == 'A') // do something with anchor tag

If you add case insensitive matching to that it will be even slower.

Instead I decided to try to check the constructor of the node to determine what type it is. For example for the anchor (A) tag, modern browsers will use the prototype of HTMLAnchorElement. This can potentially speed up these checks if you’re looking for a known node type.

if (node.constructor === HTMLAnchorElement) // do something
// OR...
if (node instanceof HTMLAnchorElement) // do something

I ran this performance test in various browsers. It traverses all nodes in a large HTML documents and checks which ones are anchor nodes. It first does a blank run to eliminate any initialization quirks. Then it does a control run without the anchor check. Then it tests each of the above models.

IE6 and IE7 will obviously fail since they don’t support the HTMLAnchorElement constructor/prototype. For that case you would have to fall back to the nodeName property.

IE8 will be slightly slower with the constructor check than the nodeName check. But the difference is marginal in the overall scope of IE’s slowness.

WebKit will gain significant performance using the constructor check. The difference is relatively small to the overhead of manually walking the tree. However, if you take the control value from the blank run into account, the difference of just the node type checks will be significant (several times faster). The slow part is the WebKit DOM API, so you will see this with both JavaScriptCore and V8 (Safari and Chrome respectively).

Firefox will be slower on the first run for some weird reason. But in subsequent runs the constructor check will be faster than the nodeName check.

As a side note, node.tagName is no different. That is just an alias for node.nodeName.

In John Resig’s case sensitivity he discusses the case inconsistencies of the nodeName property in various contexts and the impact on performance. For example, in IE, the value of nodeName of unknown elements (like the new HTML5 elements) keeps it original case as in the markup.

This means that any proper CSS selector search for such elements would have to run a case-insensitive match against the nodeName property. Unfortunately the little trick I’ve shown above doesn’t remedy this problem because unknown elements will be lacking a known constructor. However, known Elements can still utilize this trick as a slight performance boost, while letting unknown element fallback to a case insensitive match.

UPDATE: I added a case-insensitive match to the performance tests using regular expressions – showing the added overhead compared to constructor checking.

Let’s say I have a link (anchor tag with href), and I wish to attach an event listener to it.

<ul>
  <li><a id="mylink" href="http://...">my link</a></li>
</ul>

document.id('mylink').addEvent('click', function(){
  console.log('hello world');
});

Now, if I click the link it will log the message but the browser window will also visit the location of the link. There are a bunch of such default behaviors to pretty much every event in the DOM. If we’re implementing custom behavior, we typically want to prevent this default behavior. A common practise is to have the method return false as such:

document.id('mylink').addEvent('click', function(){
  console.log('hello world');
  return false;
});

THIS IS BAD! Don’t. To understand the reason for this, you need to understand event bubbling and the difference between preventDefault and stopPropagation.

Event bubbling and stopPropagation

When an event is dispatched, it first fires the listeners of the ‘mylink’ element (not quite true, but we don’t use capture). But then it propagates (bubbles) up to the LI-element, UL-element, BODY-element etc.  So for every click on any element, the ‘click’ event is triggered on the BODY-element. After all of that, the default behavior of the browser is triggered.

In most browsers bubbling continues to the document and window objects, but that’s not always true for IE.

This is a powerful model. It allows us to do things like Event delegation. You can place a listener on the UL-element to catch any events triggered on the LI-elements without adding listeners to all the existing or any new LI-elements.

Sometimes we don’t want bubbling to occur. Let’s say for example that I wanted to have a ‘click’ event handler on the UL-element that handles clicks on the UL area outside of any A-element. Then I could accept the Event object as the first parameter, use stopPropagation during the click event on the A-element to stop the event before it reaches the UL.

document.getElements('ul').addEvent('click', function(){
  console.log('You clicked within the UL but outside of any link.');
});
 
document.getElements('a').addEvent('click', function(event){
  console.log('You clicked a link.');
  event.stopPropagation();
});

preventDefault

In my example above the browser would still visit the href of the link. Stopping propagation (bubbling) doesn’t actually prevent the default browser action. So we also need to call preventDefault during the click event to prevent the default operation of clicking a link.

document.getElements('a').addEvent('click', function(event){
  console.log('You clicked a link.');
  event.stopPropagation();
  event.preventDefault();
});

Now since this is fairly common MooTools has a shortcut for doing both stopPropagation AND preventDefault. Namely the stop() method:

document.getElements('a').addEvent('click', function(event){
  console.log('You clicked a link.');
  event.stop();
});

So, why is return false bad?

In the standard browser DOM model it’s equivalent to calling event.preventDefault(); but in MooTools it’s equivalent to calling event.stop(); i.e. it also calls stopPropagation.

This is a problem. If you use this model routinely you may not notice that you actually prevent plugins attached to elements higher up in the bubbling chain.

Let’s say I want to use the ‘mouseleave’ event to hide the UL-element when the mouse leaves. If I also return false on the ‘mouseout’ event on the A-element, I may not get the ‘mouseleave’ event because the A-element stops it. OR maybe I have a plugin higher up that requires that my events bubble. It’ll be even more prevalent as more plugins makes use of Event delegation.

Therefore you need to be very explicit about when you stop propagation and not.

Second of all, the “return false” API doesn’t make sense. The function isn’t failing. It isn’t canceled. In fact, it’s canceling a DIFFERENT function.

Therefore you should ALWAYS be explicit by calling either event.preventDefault(), event.stopPropagation() or event.stop(); instead of relying on an implicit convention that differs between frameworks.

Returning a false value is a relic from the old days when we only had a single listener per event.

Binding Parameters

Sometimes you need to bind parameters that you wish to pass to an event listener. A common practise is to use bind.

document.getElements('a').addEvent('click', function(paramA, paramB){
  // do something with this, paramA and paramB
  return false;
}.bind(someObj, [objA, objB]));

In this case you can’t accept an Event object since you’ve bound your parameters to other objects. In this case you can use bindWithEvent to let the first parameter (the event object) get through, while binding the remaining parameters.

document.getElements('a').addEvent('click', function(event, paramA, paramB){
  // do something with this, paramA and paramB
  event.stop();
}.bindWithEvent(someObj, [objA, objB]));

$lambda(false)

“But I don’t want to type out all of that just to stop an event. I like $lambda(false) to easily block events.”

People sometimes use the $lambda method to create a function that returns false to easily stop an event without doing anything else: el.addEvent(‘click’, $lambda(false));

So you need a method that does nothing other than accepts an Event object and calls preventDefault, stopPropagation or stop? Thanks to MooTools generics you can easily do that like this:

element.addEvent('click', Event.preventDefault); // OR...
element.addEvent('click', Event.stopPropagation); // OR...
element.addEvent('click', Event.stop);

For you that think “return false;” saves bandwidth… “e,” and “e.stop();” is two bytes shorter.

Additional Event Listeners on the same Element

Neither preventDefault or stopPropagation or even an error prevents any additional handlers/listeners on the same element. So if you have two handlers listening to the same event, then both will be triggered regardless of the result of either function.

That should be true for all Events, even Class events. More on that in MooTools 2.0…

The other day David Walsh was experimenting with rendering images in the browser using regular tags as pixels. Valerio picked up the idea and made some enhancements. A server-side script transformed PNG files into a JSON image format for easy parsing on the client. That raised the question… How difficult would it be to do that parsing on the client instead?

Why PNG? Well, other than becoming the new defacto standard for graphics it’s a very simple format. It’s also free of patents and uses only simple well known techniques. It makes it very easy to work with. This post is about parsing raw PNG image data in pure JavaScript. It has nothing to do with built in browser support for the format.

Base64 Encoding

JavaScript doesn’t allow us to work with binary data directly. Even with XHR we can’t work with the raw binary data because JavaScript doesn’t currently have a concept of raw bytes. Instead we have to get the bytes from a character representation of the data.

Luckily there’s already a standard transfer encoding already heavily in use in various places of the W3C standards… Base64! You can use the data: URI scheme to embed image data in your HTML or CSS documents. It’s also heavily used for binary data in e-mails.

We can get the data either from an XHR request, from a src attribute or just statically embedded in your JavaScript file. So, now we have our data as Base64 encoded string.

To work with the raw data we need a way to represent bytes. If you’re working with ASCII data you can just stick to string representations. But since we’re going to be working binary data the most useful way seems to be simple Numbers. That allows you to do bitwise operations and easily convert them to and from ASCII. It’s also provides better performance than representing the bytes as Objects.

Now we need a parser. I went with a sample parser by some guy named notmasteryet. There are others but this seems like a pretty solid implementation and allows us to work with bytes as Numbers. It also works as a reader that lets us read our data piece by piece instead of filling our memory.

DEFLATE

The current PNG standard only uses the DEFLATE algorithm for compression. It’s the same algorithm used in ZIP, GZIP, zlib, etc. So it’s a very common format.

Luckily for us, notmasteryet’s sample also includes a DEFLATE decompressor. It also works as a piece by piece reader which makes it more memory efficient to work with. The reader pattern is a great way to read data in nested formats.

PNG

The PNG format consists of a set of named chunks. A set of “IDAT” chunks makes up the main image data. The total data stream is compressed using DEFLATE. The uncompressed data is filtered using one of 5 simple delta compression filters for each line of pixels.

Notice that we haven’t yet touched any image-processing specific logic. DEFLATE and delta compression is used for text and other data as much as anything else.

The raw data consists of a color for each pixel. This can be either grayscale, RGB or a reference to a palette color. This is what we really want.

The PNG format is open and well documented. So I’m not going to cover it in any more detail.

Proof of Concept

Since we’re doing a lightweight JavaScript parser and probably have some control over the image data, we can skip some of the more outlandish features of the specification. We can also skip the verification parts. We’ll just skip the file headers and CRC checks.

I decided on an a simple API that reads each line of pixels as an array of RGB colors represented as a number.

var image = new PNG(base64data);
image.width; // Image width in pixels
image.height; // Image height in pixels
var line;
while(line = image.readLine()){
  for(var x = 0;x < line.length;x++){
    var px = line[x]; // Pixel RGB color as a single numeric value
    // white pixel == 0xFFFFFF
  }
}

I then took that RGB data and inserted the pixels into my document as DIV tags with a background-color.

In less than 3 hours I had a working Proof of Concept of a format I had never worked with before.

I skipped interlacing, alpha and some of the filters for the demo. It’s not meant to be a fully working prototype nor a reference library in any way.

Now What?

You could…

• Display the image using a regular rendering method but use the PNG parser to extract colors using a Color Picker.
• Add obfuscation or cryptographic layers to render images that can’t be easily ripped by bots or downloaded by users.
• Render embedded PNG images using VML in Internet Explorer (which lacks data: URI support) with full alpha support.

Don’t expect this method to become the new hack for PNG or embedded images in Internet Explorer. The rendering methods here are probably too slow for that. You could do some nice stuff with CANVAS though.

However, I have demonstrated that it is possible to work with binary formats in JavaScript. We shouldn’t be afraid of utilizing existing binary standards (PNG, GZIP, SVGZ, SWF, TTF…). We shouldn’t always fallback to our comfortable old JSON format and reinvent the wheel for every client-side need.

Relevant Projects

The MooTools team is working on a tool set for vector graphics in the web browser, A.R.T. You could use binary formats to embed your vector based graphics in formats like… TrueType!

The APE (Ajax Push Engine) project brings socket programming to the JavaScript platform.

Digg’s MXHR stream parses multipart encoded data and extracts the parts for various uses. This could provide a packaging model for various widgets or data packets.

This post is in response to an off-site discussion about modular dependency strategies. But I figured I’d post it here for future reference.

The Calyptus Web Resource Manager is a project that can on compile-time or on runtime handle your JavaScript, CSS, and other client-side dependencies. You can keep source code as separate files on the server or pre-compile packages (such as .ZIP, .DLL or .JAR). Currently source is available only on the .NET/Mono platforms but the concept is valid for all platforms.

Syntax

The syntax is largely inspired to be compatible with ScriptDoc and ECMAScript 4 Draft import statement. In the top of your file you add the dependencies that your file relies on:

/*
@import [package, ]filename
@include [package, ]filename
@build [package, ]filename
@compress [always|release|never]
*/

Don’t worry, we’re not going to ruin your precious open-source project with inline docs. Read on.

@import – Indicates that this file has a dependency on the referenced file and that it needs to be included in the final document (implicitly before this one). The other file may be a JavaScript file, CSS, image, Flash or something else. The project is fully extensible.

@include – Same as @import but also indicates that the referenced file should be merged into this one on compile or runtime.

@build – Same as @include but also merges any nested @import statements. Allowing you to create a single packaged file.

@compress – Indicate whether the document should use a compression tool (such as YUI compressor) or not. Defaults to “release”, which means that it won’t compress during the debug stage.

You can reference a file by either filename/namespace or package + filename/namespace. You may include wild cards to reference an entire path or namespace. If you’re referencing another file in the same package, you can exclude the package name.

If you are running ASP.NET you can exclude the package if you’re referencing an assembly that is already referenced in your Web.config.

If you’re in a .js file, the filename will automatically look for files ending in .js.

This allows you to do a namespace like syntax on prepackaged files:

/*
@import MooTools.Core.*
@import MooTools.More.URI
*/

If you want to use the runtime view generating tools the syntax depends on what View Engine you’re running. For ASP.NET WebForms you can use the following controls:

<c:Import src="filename" runat="server" />
<c:Import assembly="package" name="namespace/filename" runat="server" />
<c:Include ... />
<c:Build ... />

In the future this will be integrated into the ASP.NET ScriptManager as well. For other view engines the syntax would be much prettier.

Example

MyBaseStyle.css

div.BaseClassItem {
  background-image: url(MyBaseImage.png);
}

MyBaseClass.js

// @import MyTheme.css
var MyBaseClass = new Class({
  initialize: function(){
    this.element = new Element('div', { className: 'BaseClassItem' });
  }
});

MyChildClass.js

// @import MyBaseClass.js
var MyChildClass = new Class({
  Extends: MyBaseClass,
  ...
});

MyView.aspx

<c:Include src="MyChildClass.js" />

OUTPUT:

<link href="MyBaseStyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script src="MyBaseClass.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var MyChildClass=new Class({Extends:MyBaseClass,...});
</script>

Since I used the included command the file is included in the output document. All it’s dependencies are automatically added to the document through links.

Any referenced file is only added once to the output. So it’s no problem adding multiple references to the same resource in partial views or by indirect dependencies.

MyOtherView.aspx

<c:Import src="MyChildClass.js" />
<c:Import src="MyBaseClass.js" />

OUTPUT:

<link href="MyBaseStyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script src="MyBaseClass.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="MyChildClass.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

In the sample above, I import the base class after the child class. Since the child is dependent on the base, it will be included first. Therefore the second reference to MyBaseClass.js is excluded.

Typical Work Flow – Late Optimization

Typically you would only use the @import statement in all your resources. You should only reference any direct resources that your code or style sheet uses. Indirect files are referenced by the referenced resources so that if a dependency changes, you don’t have to update all your reliers. Your views will only reference the direct resources that it is using by import statements as well.

This will generate a lot of <script> and <link> tags in your documents. This is not good for production where you want to minimize the overhead of multiple requests. That’s when you start building clusters.

Common.css

/*
@build Headers.css
@build Footers.css
@build MyBaseStyle.css
*/

Common.js

/*
@build MooTools.Core.Fx.Tween
@build MyChildClass.js
*/

Now I can include the cluster Common.js in my view:

<c:Import src="Common.css" />
<c:Import src="Common.js" />
...
<c:Include src="MyChildClass.js" />

OUTPUT:

<link href="Common.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script src="Common.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

The MyChildClass.js reference and all it’s dependencies are ignored since those file has already been included in the document by Common.css and Common.js. You can for example add these clusters to your Master view to automatically optimize all your partial views. If you remove a reference from your cluster it won’t break any of your code, since those files are individually added by your partial views to your document.

This pattern will allow you to do late optimization of your load-time by grouping only the files that are commonly used in to clusters. Leaving edge-case files into the outer branches of your site. To accomplish this I recommend that you use a modular framework such as MooTools.

Your clusters should be named and composed in relevant packages for your site, not in packages of JavaScript frameworks. For example, DON’T create a MooTools.js cluster that includes all MooTools files.

By default, @include and @build commands are evaluated as @import during the debug stage. That makes it easy to find the references to your source code with debugging tools such as FireBug.

Messing Up Your Beautiful Source? Use Place Holders

If you’re working with a consultant project you can just put all your references in the source file. That makes it very easy to work with. But if you have an open-source project you may not want to mess up the source with dependency references. Instead, use place holder files that @include the original source and references the dependency place holders using @import.

Fx.js

/*
@import Class.Extras.js
@include Real/Source/Fx/Fx.js
*/

Fx.CSS.js

/*
@import Fx.js
@import Element.Style.js
@include Real/Source/Fx/Fx.CSS.js
*/

Now you can reference your place holders to get dependencies instead of the original source files.

What about my CDN?

You can use a CDN to store your clusters. Just reference the full URIs in your import statements. There is a pre-built class that does this with MooTools on Google. Just @import GoogleAPIs.MooTools.

I will add an @embedded syntax to reference other files that have already been included. That way you could write your own like this:

MooTools-Cluster-Google.js

/*
@import http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/mootools/1.2.2/mootools-yui-compressed.js
@embedded MooTools.Core.*
*/

If you reference this cluster in your view, all references to your local MooTools files will be ignored since it they are already included in the Google cluster.

@include on Images

If @include filename.png is used in a style-sheet, every instance of url(filename.png) will automatically be replaced with base64 embedded data at runtime. This is only used on the runtime version since this content can’t be sent to IE browsers. IE browsers will get the url(filename.png) reference intact.

This also works with view/document Include commands. In that case an <img> tag is rendered with a link or embedded content depending on the browser capabilities.

This pattern allows you to do late load time optimization of image dependencies.

Getting Started

As always, begin by checking out the source.

The HTML 5 working draft is continuing it’s development of the future support for HTML 5. This includes new tags, attributes and a strong specification of how clients should interact with old and new elements. What I find even more intriguing, is the standardization of many advanced JavaScript DOM features (such as editable content, drag and drop). Most of which has been available to IE users for more than a decade. This is one area that standards has been particularly slow to adopt. With the current beta versions of Safari, Chrome and Firefox these new browsers are finally ready to leave IE behind (yes, even IE 8).

Many people are still frightened of implementing code according to a working draft. Especially since it’s not scheduled to be complete until 2012. In my opinion, those fears are largely unfounded at this point. The primary reason for this is that many of the features have been available in IE for many years and the HTML 5 specification centers around keeping some historical compliance. So the primary threat for lagging cross browser functionality has already been eliminated. It is also the WHATWG’s estimate that browsers will have full compliance and people will have started utilizing this new standard long before it is finalized. For these reasons, by the time you read this, you may already be a late adopter.

However, there are still some quirks that you need to be aware of. I’ve been working on cross browser layers of the HTML 5 specifications since 2007 including backwards compatible code for older browsers. This code has been used in production and little of it has changed since mid-2008. Therefore I’ve started work on introducing these features to my JavaScript framework of choice, MooTools. While I refactor my code for this purpose I thought I might introduce some of the quirks that you might come across in your own endeavors.

Coming up

Part 2 – Drag and Drop, Copy and Paste

Part 3 – Range and Selection

Part 4 – ContentEditable and ExecCommand