Protofy – The art of Prototyping

XSLT is a pure language. Its sublime, elementary and effecient. Its correct, exactly as how things should be.

However we are developers, we earn money when we complete tasks on time, we get poor promotion scores if things aren’t completed on time. Its a rant but its true.

If you have ever been on a project utilizing XSLT for the first time, consider changing the way you work. Here are top 3 things that XSLT can make you change, code-thought-wise

• You have to declare a template each time you want to re-use a variable in a new way
• Special characters need special xsl files, else consider #160 ; instead of
• Attributes are “@*”

Here are changes you should accomodate on your daily life to work better

• Knowing these please stop writing Javascript or any other scripting language till further notice.
• Understand that crashes and XSL errors are making you a good machine that generates optimized code.
• Learn to negotiate whats possible with the language and trouble the heck out of your manager or superior. If you work alone, stand before a mirror and arrange your priorities as post-its until you can’t see yourself on the mirror.

You will find these resources extremely helpful though in your journey, I wish you good luck

• Improve your XSLT in 5 ways: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslt5.html
• The fabulously relaxing, XSLT FAQ: http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/index.html
  This guy almost seems like darwin to me, rather than mr. d. pawson.
• My App ran in IE, if yours has to support Mozilla -https://www.mozilla.org/projects/xslt/faq.html
  “Mozilla won’t load XSLT stylesheets from a different domain for security reasons”

If you came this far, here’s something that’s worth trying

And you now ask what I did?

I used the Sarissa AJAX library to build a Vehicle Pricing Sytem for an automobile giant for three months. It was a prototype.

This page is a XHTML 1.0 strict page and I wanted a new window to open on external pages on the previous post

Sadly XHTML 1.0 strict doctypes dont allow blank window’s. Enter good old hacks

Here’s how it is achieved, use the standard

< a href=" yourlink.html " rel="external" .... and use the following snippet to be called on all pages

function externalLinks() {
if (!document.getElementsByTagName) return;
var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (var i=0; i   var anchor = anchors[i];i++) {
if (anchor.getAttribute("href") &&
anchor.getAttribute("rel") == "external")
anchor.target = "_blank";
}
}
window.onload = externalLinks;Code from the article at Sitepoint : New-Window Links in a Standards-Compliant World

You just have to be a dynamic HTML in your head or else you will be archived

I love prototypes, here is what I have been doing.

That was a feign attempt at making this search engine friendly, Now that it failed, Read on to the real stuff

Mochikit uses simple attributes, to create an unobtrusive _Javascript based interface. I used the sortable tables demo. There were two issues, only ISO standard strings were allowed on the date sorting and no blank strings please we are puritans

The wordpress installation was amazing…easy and cool. Over the next few months, expect to see me ranting across everything.