Why, Blog, Why?

Here's a link for all my developer friends:

HTML 5 is still being drafted, but here is an early list of differences from the current HTML 4 spec. There is some very interesting stuff being proposed for this version. One thing that caught my attention early on is that the specification won't be considered complete until there are at least 2 complete implementations of the draft - something very different from previous versions. Also, the input element will have a lot more choices for the type attribute available, such as date pickers and true combo boxes. It will be interesting to follow this through the draft process. And the specification will have two sets of guidelines - one for web developers/content writers and another for browser/user agent developers. (One reason why <font> is not dead in HTML 5 )

http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/html5/html4-differences/Overview.html

In related news, the W3C is calling on all web professionals to participate in the HTML 5 discussion.

I was burned by the document.getElementById() may return incorrect element in IE and Opera bug again today. This time though it was particularly bothersome as I spent the better part of the afternoon trying to figure out why I couldn't access the length property of the value of a textarea element in IE when the same code worked fine in Firefox. I mean, getting the length of a value of any form element through JavaScript usually isn't like rocket science.

<textarea id="description" name="description">Here is some text</textarea> <script type="text/javascript"> var myElement = document.getElementById('description'); alert(myElement.value.length); //alert: 17 </script>

Every time I tried to execute that code in IE it would complain that 'value.length' is null or not an object. After a whole crap load of debugging I finally tracked it down to the fact that IE was actually referencing the <meta name="description"> tag in the head section of the page. Yeah, see even though the function is getElementById, IE still thought I meant the element with the name attribute equal to "description". Or as my brother put it in a comment to the original post (before the comments were wiped in the great Data Loss of '06), maybe IE thought I was calling the getJustAboutAnythingIFeelLike() function... Damn you IE for making me have to change my ID attributes to suite your leisurely implementation of the DOM!

I've recently been working on a project that has managed to creep wildly out of scope. About 300% out of scope, really. And I think the old tire-swing adage just about covers the reasons behind the scope creep.

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Dear Ecma,

I would just like to point out how completely asinine your JavaScript Date object implementation is. How did so many of it's member functions come to operate in such a non-intuitive way in relation to each other?

Why does getDate() return the day of the month instead of the date itself, while getDay() returns the day of the week and not the day of the month?

Why does getMonth() return a value from 0-11, but getDate() returns a value from 1-31?

Do you know how utterly confusing that is???

Frustrated,
Me

In the late 1990's I took several professional development courses at a WPI satellite school, which eventually led to my current career track as a web application developer. One of the courses involved an introduction to database theory. At the end of the course the professor passed out a page of useful SQL commands that we would probably have need of at some point in our lives. I've held on to it for a long time and have referenced it often. I've decided to post it here for two reasons: It's easier for me to find this way (and I can bookmark it), and someone else might find it useful. The tips were specific to Oracle, but I imagine (I'm not a DBA so don't take my word for it) that most of these commands, if not all of them, are valid under many modern Db engines.

Useful SQL Commands.pdf