Last week Think Vitamin released an article by me about the changes in web development. I wrote this article over Christmas to publish at another web magazine but it was not to be as they stopped publishing for the moment.

I consider this article and what it talks about very important at the moment. I’ve covered some of the topics in my presentation at the head conference 7 reasons why web development is running in circles already and I stick to my guns: if we want to prevent web development to decline into a “make it work now and cheap” state we need to make sure that we use what is out there already rather than trying to build everything from scratch.

The web these days reminds me of that chest of drawers in my grandparents’ flat: always stocked with sweets and easy to access. With APIs, SDKs and even filtering and caching mechanisms like YQL, Pipes or Gnip it is amazingly easy to build working systems on top of the internet as it is rather than trying to scrape data together. Using JavaScript and CSS frameworks it is pretty easy to build interfaces that are working across browsers without having to deep-dive into the pain that is cross-browser support and knowing all the hacks for each of the browsers.

I really like that after a long time hacking and making the web barely work for all the users out there we have a chance to concentrate on building good apps that solve problems of users rather than spending 90% of our time fixing the outcome to work for browsers.

Maybe it is also time to stop complaining about CSS not being a “real programming language” and lamenting the “dark art of building a three column layout” and concentrate on what we are passionate about and leaving these jobs to the people who are passionate about fighting that battle.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The video of the Koala bear drinking water from an Australian fire fighter after the bushfires. Awwww….
• A quite extensive list of printable vouchers and cheap coupons for UK companies
• An interesting hack to make Firefox log which fonts get rendered on web sites
• When can I use… is an interesting site featuring compatibility tables for features in HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other upcoming web technologies – watch out PPK, you got competition.
• Steve Outing wrote a good piece on monetization of online editorial content – Forget Micropayments—Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content introducing Kachingle as a company that has a good plan
• An interesting Matrix of fonts bundled with Mac and Windows operating systems, Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite
• Finding out that YUI has a nifty date formatting tool like strftime in JavaScript
• An OsX hack to allow quicklook to show markdown

Things that made me happy this morning

• Being able to check in to the hotel room at 6am rather than waiting till noon (Bangalore, India)
• The Onion just had me in stitches with an amazing amount of potty mouth in sony releases new stupid piece of shit
• Sitepoint offers a 5 for 1 book deal on all their ebooks and donates the money to victims of the fires in Australia
• Twitter has a handy account rate limit API in case you wonder if you are blocked or if you made a mistake
• The BBC radio labs released a presentation on how they make web sites

This April I will go down under to be part of the Web Directions South Roadshow. On Tuesday the 21st I’ll be in Melbourne and Thursday the 23rd in Sidney to give a one day workshop on Pragmatic, accessible JavaScript in a web services world.

JavaScript is an amazing amount of different things to different people. There was a time when it was a plaything to make web sites shiny and interesting. Nowadays you would be hard pressed to think of any web product that does not use it. Using JavaScript is easy. Making it mesh with other technologies like the backend, CSS and HTML less so. We’re moving further and further away from a world where you’ll be asked to code something from scratch. Instead we’re using frameworks and APIs, and consuming web services.
In this workshop we’ll start from an everyday situation – a rather messed up old web product. We’ll clean it up to make it accessible for everyone, easy to maintain and hand over to third parties, and always up-to-date by piggy-backing on web services like Yahoo’s YQL and Pipes, and social systems like Twitter, Flickr and Delicious. You’ll walk away with a new enthusiasm for Javascript, but also armed with a whole collection of rock solid techniques that will let you save your company time and money by doing the job right the first time.

I am very much looking forward to this, not only because I’ve never been in Australia but also because of meeting John from Web Directions in Denver two days ago and getting infected by his enthusiasm on the subject.

If the normal pricing of the workshop is too much I got good news: by using the discount code is WD-CH the price for the workshop back to *$499*.

Hope to see you there!

Chris

• FireScope is a Firefox extension that adds a CSS/HTML reference embedded to Firebug.
• YQL now has an own blog and announced Open Data Tables so you can define your own conversion tables!
• Cornify is the #1 unicorn and rainbow service worldwide, giving websites sparkle around the world.
• XKCD explains the first base, second base metaphors finally I get what these Americans are on about.
• Paul Boag keeps his tongue firmly in his cheek with 10 things a web designer would never tell you
• Simon Willison pondering about the right mime type for JSON
• The Stanford Laptop Orchestra plays music by tilting MacBooks
• A good talk by John Resig on performance improvements in browsers
• bacolicio.us adds bacon to any web site. Needs more sizzle though, for that you need YUI bacon
• Smashing Magazine started a section called “Ask SM” where you can email or tweet questions to the experts and get answers on the site:

This is our second installment of Ask SM, featuring reader questions about Web design, focusing on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. If you have a question about one of these topics, feel free to reach me (Chris Coyier) through one of these methods:
1. Send an email to ask [at] smashingmagazine [dot] com with your question.
2. Post your question in our forum. You will need to sign up (yes, the forum is not officially launched yet, but it is running!).
3. Or, if you have a quick question, just tweet us @smashingmag or @chriscoyier with the tag [Ask SM].
Please note: I will do what I can to answer questions, but I certainly won’t be able to answer them all. However, posting questions to the forum gives you the best opportunity to get help from the community.