Rob Eberhardt

I add a custom IIF function to every VBscript I make:

' IIF recreated for VBscript
FUNCTION IIF(Expression, Truepart, Falsepart)
	IF Expression THEN 
		IIF = Truepart
	ELSE
		IIF = Falsepart
	END IF
END FUNCTION

'used like so:
strFlavor = IIF(strColor="brown", "chocolate", "not chocolate")

Mind you, it evaluates all parameters on the way in, so even though this checks the objTest object when assigning using it, it would still fail (when the objTest object reference is not set):

strFlavor = IIF(IsObject(objTest), objTest.flavor, "vanilla")

It's no ternary operator, but it's still indispensible for efficient VBScript coding.

Guess I'm not the only one who was baffled by the new W3C XMLHTTPRequest spec credits.

From Dare Obasanjo:

Interesting. A W3C specification that documents a proprietary Microsoft API which not only does not include a Microsoft employee as a spec author but doesn't even reference any of the IXMLHttpRequest documentation on MSDN. I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere. ;)

And then finally from Anne van Kesteren (one of the spec's authors):

Hereby my apologies to everyone who had to waste his time by writing a rant... The current draft reads: "Special thanks also to the Microsoft employees who first implemented the XMLHttpRequest interface, which was first widely deployed by the Windows Internet Explorer browser."

It's great that XMLHttpRequest is finally becoming an official standard.  It's better though, that the "other" browsers didn't wait for this before implementing it.  Real progress has happened as a result, in particular the recent popularity (& naming) of the AJAX technique, and the somewhat-related "Web 2.0" phenomenon.

The news also makes me smile at the anti-Microsoft folks who have thrown stones at Internet Explorer's standards support -- once again the IE team innovated (*overused word through gritted teeth*) a proprietary extension, and it was such a good thing that the competition swiped the idea, thus making it a de-facto standard.

I'd rather have a good de-facto standard now, than an official one too-late. End result: Developers and Users win (and they already are winning).

Footnote: Anyone else think it's strange that the standard's authors list seems to represent every browser except for XMLHttpRequest's inventor?

Thanks to Clagnut, I'm observing CSS Naked Day on April 5^th.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

For the remaining dotText-ers out there who want this to automatically kick-in every April 5^th, I just added this condition to DTP.aspx:

<%
// suspend styles on April 5 to observe CSS Naked Day - http://naked.dustindiaz.com/
DateTime dtNaked = DateTime.Today; 
if(!(dtNaked.Month==4 && dtNaked.Day==5)){
%>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/mystyles.css" />
<%
}
%>

Via Dean Edwards' Links, meet HedgerWow's <SELECT>-Free Layer, a CSS-only workaround for Internet Explorer's SELECT bug with z-index.

It's not quite clear from the demo, but I think the magic is an absolutely-positioned + transparent + huge IFRAME inside the layer to show.  C'est trés hacky, but it still seems better (in a way) than the usual dynamic hide/show javascript approach.

Here's hoping that Microsoft will quickly windows-update us all with IE7 (which fixes this bug, hoorah), and free us of these sHACKles.