If you’re not in the programming field, you likely got hit by a bunch of acronyms there as if you had been hit by a bus. Let me break it down: AJAX : A technique that makes websites look fast and smooth, unlike “old” style application. Think about the way Google maps looks, or Netflix. DOM: HTML (the language that web pages are written in) can be seen as a “tree-like” structure. This structure goes by the name of “DOM”, or “Document Object Model” Javascript: A language for telling your browser ( Firefox, IE, etc. ), to do something to the HTML page sent from the server *within your browser.

Yesterday, after a walk around Town Lake, we stopped by Austin Java for a bit of lunch. While I was waiting for my salad and Lauren for her egg burritos, I noticed the Austin-typical amount of people there with books and laptops, no doubt hard at work on materials for their classes. The guy next to me was working on something in Word. As I watched him fiddle with margins and tab stops, go clicky-click to mutate some words from regular text to bold I realized, again, just how incredibly painful it is to have presentation (bold, left margin of 12, or 30 picas) defined in the same place where you define content ( “When in the course of human events….

Or, “Dont’ make me use your ‘rich editor’” At work we’re using a wiki engine whose power user syntax has been disabled. While it’s been disabled for good reasons, it still bothers me much. What one is left with is the rich text box which works great for dumping in cut-from-Word documents or which people who don’t want to type quickly and don’t mind mousing to turn on bold etc. As a person who wants to type fast and format as he thinks it, not being able to write markup as I write in wiki data is sad, sad sad.