A while back I threw together a quick API port of the number.js from the YUI-Ext-MVC framework into the YUI 3 gallery. However, I did not give the API enough attention in my first pass, nor have I revisited it since. Today, I finally revisited the API to clean it up and add some sorely needed functions.

Let's take a moment and look back on the life and death of IE6. For those of you who missed the Mountain View funeral, there will be another one held in Colorado on the 4th. For details see http://ie6funeral.com/. May it rest in peace forever, and never, ever be used again.

Now to move onto other recent news.

I realized recently, in my work on Mint.com, that the YAHOO.util.Selector.query function does not work properly in IE 8 compatibility mode when performing a search against the class and for attributes. The issue is that previous versions of IE defined these attributes names as className and htmlFor, while IE 8 changed them to follow the standard. And a faulty if statement in the selector component does not properly use the legacy names when developers apply the X-UA-Compatible META tag to set compatibility modes.

Here is some news from the first half of Febraury that I found interesting:

In this article, we add key events into the Radial Menu. The goal is to allow end-users to navigate the menu with the keyboard, once it has been opened, using the arrow keys. Additionally, end-users will be able to select panels with the enter key and close the menu with the escape key.

I was not able to complete the Radial Menu widget keyboard events improvement. I have been blocked on an issue with the YUI 3 event detach function not working properly with events created using Y.on(), instead of nodeInstance.on(). I expect I will resolve it over the weekend and have an article for you by Tuesday. Thanks for you patience.

-matt

In the meantime, here is a video of Douglas Crockford's Talk: And Then There Was JavaScript

This article will discuss an animation plugin for the Radial Menu widget. It was written as a plugin, both to better understand the plugin infrastructure of YUI 3, and because not all developers will want animation in all cases. There are two animations, one that radiates and the another that rotates out (and in) from (and to) the center.

There has been a lot of interesting news from the second half of January. Here are some of the stories that resonated with me:

In the article, Using Ant to Consolidate CSS and JavaScript, we discussed how to use Ant for consolidating and compressing JavaScript and CSS. Today we will take that a step further by adding JSLint JavaScript validation to the process. JSLint is a code quality tool that checks your code for common JavaScript errors, best practices, and optimizations.

Keep in mind that using JSLint will hurt your feelings, so only read on if you are either brave or foolhardy.

Today's article is inspired by the Radial Menu found in many of Bioware's RPGs, such as Dragon Age. At the press of a button, the menu appears on the screen (usually pausing the game), and allows players to choose common commands. The same type of menu is possible on the web, and may even be more useful than the traditional navigation. We will use JavaScript, CSS, and YUI3 to build flexible Radial Menu widget that appears in the center of the page and responds to end-user clicks.