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ToadCast 001 - Hello World!

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First Episode

Here we go! The first ever Metal Toad Media podcast: Toadcast! This is a weekly podcast dealing with the web, technology, and anything we're into at the moment. We are really excited about this first effort and can't wait to see how this grows over time.

If you like what you hear (or don't like what you hear) leave us a comment and feel free to send us questions/topics that you'd like to hear addressed on upcoming episodes. It is our hope to eventually have guest hosts and interviews, live chats, etc...

Joining me on our first episode is friend and co-worker, Tony Rasmussen

Thanks for listening.


Topics discussed:

  • Javascript semicolon drama
  • What do you call a dev that only does html/css?
  • Minimum cross-browser testing for clients. Do we test mobile by default?
  • vendor-prefixes and opera's decision to include webkit support
  • <picture> element responsive image method

Show Notes:

Date posted: June 12, 2012

Comments

Regarding the JavaScript semi-colon drama, I blame HTML. Loose interpretation standards leads to sloppy code...and drama.

I really enjoyed the chemistry between Tony and Robbie. The ToadCast was a nice mix of funny and informative. On the subject of people who work only with HTML and CSS - somebody mentioned front end developers. I think that's appropriate term. Anyone who can lay out solid, W3C/SEO compliant HTML, well organized, cross-platform (close to) pixel perfect CSS is well deserving of some love in the web development community.

Great podcast!

As an example of js semi-colon breakage:

x=3

switch(x){
case 1:
echo 'one'
break
case 2:
echo 'two'
break
case 3:
echo 'three'
break
case 4:
echo 'four'
break
case 5:
echo 'five'
break
}

This causes "SyntaxError: Unexpected string".

I think it's a good idea to not have semi-colons optional, ever, for the purpose of debugging things like this, and also because it follows a uniform flow. I love python (optional semi-colons) and there are very few cases where you should use semi-colons (run-on statements is the only example.) In a language like python, I say leave them out, but javascript is not uniform about where it requires them, so they should be used, if for no other reason, just because it's easier to keep track of. It's like using {} on one-line if statements. It's optional, but leaving them out makes code unnecessarily non-uniform and harder to follow.

I think Douglas Crockford was a jerk, though, in this situation. If it works in tier1 browsers, then it should work as minified code in tier1 browsers. The reason it didn't work is that semi-colons should have been added by jsmin, which in my opinion, is a bug.

I think "no one uses opera-mobile, anyway" is a super-common sentiment, and is probably the reason they are supporting other browser's prefix's. Part of the prefix's thing is that different browsers support different prefix's syntax for the same stuff (think gradients) before it becomes part of the un-prefixed syntax (browsers agree on syntax, according to standard.) If it cross-supports the other prefix's syntax, then it doesn't seem so bad, but it goes against the reasoning of using prefix's at all. I think developers should support un-prefixed + prefixed for whatever they want to support (in the case of mobile using webkit prefix & un-prefixed.)

Was the bird-browser "songbird" the firefox-based music-player?

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