a:3:{s:4:"Name";s:14:"terry bakowski";s:5:"Email";s:18:"zengmeiste@aol.com";s:7:"Comment";s:2699:"Rey.. very kewl JS stuff. once-upon-a-time I (thought -I-) was a bithead, back in the Big Iron days when COBOL + PL/1 (great language, don't know why it wasn't popular) ruled IT.

Reading your BigList and a teensy sample of the jQuery cookbook.. as a non- xyzTML (c 2000 tjb) guy and very ex- master of those ancient computer languages... I find the whole thing hilarious.
And scary! And more than a little... insane.

Webpage development / testing / programming is far, far more complicated than you think, once you look under the hood.  It (jQuery, f'rinstance) does use the same concepts & functions we had back then, e.g. preprocessing (aka tweaking, Also not understood by my boss; or my peers, hmm) the code so it'd compile nicely for beat-it-to-death testing. Things like 'dynamic program loads' were UNcommon, everything was self-contained; well, except for my stuff, I was a rogue.  Now -every teensy chunk- IS dynamagically incorporated into the DOM (a new acronym for me, I luv 'em, thankyouverymuch).  If ya c'n See it, click it, read it, play it...  it's on yer PC, as I once explained to my partner who's quite paranoid about the internet.

Stuff (webpage.. erm..  development) seems to have evolved from a combo of Script/VS (ibm manual composition language) + SPF DM (dynamic page / panel / form definition) and DTP (desktop publishing).  'cept it got a-holt of a biiiiiiig bag of steroids and kept on metastasizing.  S'incredible, absolutely incredible.  Mind boggling, even.

Wouldn't pages execute (be interpreted, composed and displayed) faster if'n they were (pre-)compiled viz. .CHMs? And they'd be bulletproof as well, I'd think.  Or maybe de-centralization of components (local caching) would speed things up, I often see '..waiting for...'; tells me pages are waaaaay too complex, way too intertwingled.

But all this DID create a massive new industry, holey advertising, Batman!  Leaves guys like me in the dust, but I truly DO enjoy bouncing around the net. My ADD helps that a lot.

If I had the time (and the energy!) to 'get into' the various flavors of IWP (interactive webpage publishing, DTP's successor, please pass the acronym around, it might even be original?) I could prolly make a mint, but the eyes are shot and the brain's not far behind.  But, oh boy!, you guys go and have fun, eh!

..and wouldja know... is there anything similar to Black Widow (every hear of that?) around? Just curious, seems like it'd make a great forensic tool for duping stuff from phishing folk.

Just thoughts from off the top of my head.

Have a great Easter, I've got to go review a Randall Thompson piece we're singing tomorrow.

Peace,

   Terry Bakowski";}