Simon Willison's Weblog: douglas-crockford

JavaScript: The Good Parts

2008-04-19T16:38:52+00:00

Douglas Crockford’s soon-to-be-published book on the subset of JavaScript that he recommends. Promises to be “short, but dense”—if it’s half as good as his JavaScript lectures this is going to be a must-have.

Tags: books, douglas-crockford, javascript

hash

2008-03-30T18:34:22+00:00

hash

Douglas Crockford: “Any HTML tag that accepts a src= or href= attribute should also be allowed to take a hash= attribute”—to protect against file tampering and (more importantly) provide a truly robust caching mechanism.

Tags: caching, douglas-crockford, hash, html, sha1

Quoting Douglas Crockford

2007-11-07T15:36:15+00:00

In the long term, I want to replace JavaScript and the DOM with a smarter, safer design. In the medium term, I want to use something like Google Gears to give us vats with which we can have safe mashups. But in the short term, I recommend that you be using Firefox with No Script. Until we get things right, it seems to be the best we can do.

— Douglas Crockford

Tags: dom, douglas-crockford, firefox, google-gears, javascript, mashups, noscript, security

The Elements of JavaScript Style

2007-09-13T08:22:21+00:00

The Elements of JavaScript Style

Douglas Crockford illustrates better coding practises through refactoring of old code.

Tags: douglas-crockford, javascript, refactoring, yahoo

Base32 encoding

2007-08-17T23:25:41+00:00

Base32 encoding

I was on the verge of inventing this when I discovered that Douglas Crockford had invented it for me.

Via programming.reddit.com

Tags: base32, douglas-crockford, encoding

JavaScript Minifier that doesn't break code

2007-06-04T17:44:46+00:00

JavaScript Minifier that doesn't break code

Perl re-implementation of Douglas Crockford’s classic JSMin that doesn’t clobber IE’s conditional comments, by Peter Michaux.

Via James Bennett

Tags: conditionalcomments, douglas-crockford, internet-explorer, james-bennett, javascript, jsmin, perl, pete-michaux

JSON and Browser Security

2007-04-11T00:52:56+00:00

JSON and Browser Security

Douglas Crockford suggests using secret tokens to protect JSON content, and avoiding wrapper hacks to protect unauthorised JSON delivery as they may fall foul of undiscovered browser bugs in the future.

Tags: douglas-crockford, json, security

Browser Wars

2007-02-22T07:53:30+00:00

Browser Wars

Doug Crockford is hosting a panel discussion with Chris Wilson from IE, Mike Shaver from Mozilla and Håkon Wium Lie from Opera on February 28th in Sunnyvale.

Tags: chris-wilson, douglas-crockford, hakonwiumlee, mike-shaver

Quoting Douglas Crockford

2007-01-08T19:04:05+00:00

With this much storage, you can imagine filesystems in which files are never deleted and files are never rewritten. The filesystem never forgets. Such systems could be much more reliable than the systems we use today which are based on the assumption that storage is a constrained resource.

— Douglas Crockford

Tags: douglas-crockford, storage

Quoting Douglas Crockford

2006-12-21T10:14:13+00:00

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

— Douglas Crockford

Tags: douglas-crockford, json

Quoting Dave Winer

2006-12-20T19:21:48+00:00

I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can't be that hard to parse, so let's see what it looks like, and damn, IT'S NOT EVEN XML! [...] Who did this travesty? Let's find a tree and string them up. Now.

— Dave Winer

Tags: dave-winer, delicious, douglas-crockford, json, niall-kennedy, xml

Quoting Douglas Crockford

2006-12-14T17:40:10+00:00

XHTML is not going to replace HTML as the web's official markup language because it turns out that resilience is more useful than brittleness.

— Douglas Crockford

Tags: douglas-crockford, xhtml

Proposed RFC for application/json

2006-08-01T21:29:17+00:00

Proposed RFC for application/json

Douglas Crockford is putting JSON through the IETF.

Via davidflanagan.com

Tags: douglas-crockford, ietf, json, rfc

JSON and Yahoo!'s JavaScript APIs

2005-12-16T00:10:57+00:00

I had the pleasure yesterday of seeing Douglas Crockford speak about JSON, the ultra-simple data interchange format he has been promoting as an alternative to XML. JSON is a subset of JavaScript, based around that language's array, string and object literal syntax.

As of today, JSON is supported as an alternative output format for nearly all of Yahoo!'s Web Service APIs. This is a Really Big Deal, because it makes Yahoo!'s APIs available to JavaScript running anywhere on the web without any of the normal problems caused by XMLHttpRequest's cross domain security policy.

Like JSON itself, the workaround is simple. You can append two arguments to a Yahoo! REST Web Service call:


&output=json&callback=myFunction

The page returned by the service will look like this:


myFunction({ JSON data here });

You just need to define myFunction in your code and it will be called when the script is loaded. To make cross-domain requests, just dynamically create your script tags using the DOM:


var script = document.createElement('script');
script.type = 'text/javascript';
script.src = '...' + '&output=json&callback=myFunction';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);

In long running apps you'll want to work out some kind of cleanup system to remove script tags from the DOM once they have been executed. More on this technique here.

It should be noted that del.icio.us has had APIs like this for a while.

Tags: douglas-crockford, json, yahoo