KuraFire Network

It's been quiet on the KuraFire Network of late, though for good reasons. I've been very busy with a plethora of things, not in the least of which comes moving to an apartment of my own in Ealing. However, I feel compelled to give you a long, very long overdue update on FACE as well as a small overview of the things that I've been busy with outside of this blog, most of which revolve around getting published!

First, there is my contribution to the new book by Donna Baker, entitled CSS For Web Designers Only. I wrote a few pieces on FACE, the modern web and the future of the web for her book and it was only recently that this book hit the shelves

I also wrote a BiteSize™ article, Cleaning up code with semantic anchors for that fantastic new resource BiteSize Standards by John Oxton and a bunch of other brilliant people.

In a similarly great environment can be found my article for Ryan Carson's Vitamin, What's next for web accessibility? It's full of bitesize chunks of accessibility tips following an in-depth look at where web accessibility is going.

Next up is a series of articles on Informit.com:

• Introducing Easy Web Site Animation with FACE
• Put a New FACE on Your Web Site
• Advanced Uses of FACE
• Help! I'm FACE-ing problems!: Troubleshooting FACE
• Other Uses and Implementations of FACE
• The Re-emergence of JavaScript

My latest Informit article was published just last week actually, entitled Prototype, Dojo and jQuery and it is a comparison between the three JavaScript libraries. This brings me to the long overdue FACE update, so here goes…

A FACE update

FACE 1.0 beta has been available since December of 2005, and shamefully has not been updated ever since. Co-creator Tim Hofman and I have had a lot of ideas for it for even longer than that, but we never quite got around to working on it further. We've made attempts but a lot of our ideas required a fairly thorough redesigning of the JavaScript engine it utilizes, and we just couldn't really find the time to sit down and work on it long enough to make that happen.

With me at a different company and in a different country from Tim, the future for FACE may look bleak, but I have good news of a sort! While I was researching jQuery for that last Informit article, I got rather infatuated with it. It's a wonderful little library, and to me it definitely accomplished its goal of making the process of writing JavaScript fun to do.

Now, I was introduced to jQuery via a reader asking me if it was okay for them to "port FACE to jQuery" - long story short, during my bout of enthusiasm on jQuery I ended up porting FACE to jQuery in as little as two hours. It's not quite done yet (haven't had a chance to continue where I left off) but already the new script, dubbed jQFace, performs very well and operates much better than FACE itself in three important ways:

1. jQFace is truly unobtrusive, in that it won't mess with any pre-existing classes and ID's your to-be-animated elements may have (unlike FACE);
2. jQFace supports not just FACE's current offerings of onMouseOver and onLoad, but the whole range of on-something events;
3. jQFace, thanks to jQuery, can trigger on "document.ready" state, which is usually a lot earlier than the window.onload approach and thus does not suffer from the "Flash of un-FACE'd content" like FACE itself does

Credit where credit is due, it's all John Resig's marvellous jQuery that made it possible for me to accomplish all that (and in such a short time, no less!) - but here's the crux: jQFace is not quite finished, and more importantly, it will distance itself from FACE on a core feature: implementation.

Where FACE requires you to only plug the face.js file into your page and that'd be all the JavaScript-related work you'd have to do, jQFace will not take this approach, for a number of reasons I'll explain once I release the thing. In essence, you will be writing a line or two of JavaScript for a jQFace-powered animation, and because of that I'm not going to replace FACE with jQFace but instead, let them co-exist.

Once released, jQFace will definitely offer a lot of functionality that FACE still painfully lacks, but hopefully the event will give Tim and myself the proper incentive to push FACE forward to its next release, just to make it catch up to jQFace.

As the exact implementation of jQFace is not decided upon yet, I'm not going to make any comments about that. If you're (very) well-versed in jQuery yourself and would like to help with tossing ideas around on what would be the optimal configuration for jQFace, feel free to give me a shout. Mind you, I'm also really busy these days so I may be slow to respond!

Now, while it doesn't really have anything to do with my Web-related activities, I do feel that this post is an appropriate place for me to mention two more publications. They concern my photography, and both are for pictures taken as much as a year and a half ago. I must thank my Flickr Pro account for that, showing strangers my entire picture collection and not just the 200 most recent ones. So, to wrap things up:

Windows users can see two pictures of mine from Minneapolis in the Schmap Minneapolis Guide. Mac OS X users have to wait until November for a compatible version, though that link at least shows which two pictures are concerned.

And lastly, my cheese picture has been featured on the cover of a Japanese (based, English in content) magazine. The sample copies they sent me arrived at my address in the Netherlands so I haven't yet had a chance to see for myself what the whole thing looks like, but I still think it's pretty cool.

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