I think Otis Gospodnetić has it spot on: IMHO, commit messages are an important piece of the communication puzzle, and I feel they are often neglected or completely not even seen that way. Commit messages (that are distributed/delivered to co-developers via email or some other mechanism) help a developer keep others in the loop. They help co-developers stay up to date mostly passively, without having to proactively look for information about recent changes.

Brad Neuberg has a post up about ARIA on the iPad and some of the tricks he’s used to bend it to his will. Blogger won’t accept my OpenID to comment on the post for some reason so I’ll add some thoughts here. tabindex As Brad notes, you can set tabindex=”-1” to prevent an item in HTML from appearing in the tab order. Also as Brad notes, this won’t stop the VoiceOver cursor from moving to that element.

I have a bunch of JavaScript unit tests and for some of them I need to trigger a real keypress – one that activates the browser’s default functionality, not just triggers the JavaScript listeners. To do that, I have a simple signed applet that uses the AWT Robot to programmatically trigger the keypresses. Mostly, this works brilliantly. The problem I’m having is that about 1 time in 10, the focus goes AWOL and the key events generated by the robot simply aren’t delivered anywhere.

So Apple have announced that they will be contributing large swaths of code to the OpenJDK project and that from Java 7 onwards, Java will be a separate download from Oracle, much like Flash is now a separate download from Adobe. This really shouldn’t be unexpected for anyone who was paying attention to what was going on rather than just running around thinking the sky was falling. This is fantastic news for Java developers of all types.

Ephox has had Yonas working on with us on various TinyMCE related stuff for a while but mostly outside of the core source code on plugins for various clients. Today however, his first patch made it through both Ephox QA and the Moxiecode review into the mainline TinyMCE codebase. It will ship as part of the 3.4 release along with a bunch of other Ephox developed fixes and lots of good stuff in general.

James Turner gives a week in review and mentions the deprecated Java on OS X issue1{#footlink1:1288187415254.footnote}. One thing to correct: Deprecation basically means that neither package will be delivered as part of the installation DVDs, and updates will not come via the Apple update mechanisms. It doesn’t mean they won’t be available anymore, it just means you’ll have to download them directly from Oracle and Adobe. Firstly, there’s nothing to suggest that Java won’t come from Apple but not be part of the standard OS X package.

It’s interesting to see how many people are jumping to conclusions around the very carefully worded deprecation notice for Java in OS X. Read it carefully and pay careful attention to what it actually says: As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the Java runtime ported by Apple and that ships with Mac OS X is deprecated. Developers should not rely on the Apple-supplied Java runtime being present in future versions of Mac OS X.

I was quite pleased to see Odi’s post this morning stating that the NTLM code in HttpClient (now HttpComponents) has finally been replaced with a more robust and compatible version that supports the more modern NTLM variants. Many years ago that NTLM code was my first contribution to someone else’s open source project and it lead on to me writing a bunch of documentation and becoming an Apache committer. In turn, that’s put me in touch with a whole heap of incredibly smart people.

As part of exploring JavaScript performance, I started wondering if the particular method of looping made a difference to performance. After all, one of the most often repeated bits of advice is that JavaScript is much faster if you loop backwards through an array instead of forwards and the slow part of my code was a loop. Using jsperf.com I could set up a simple test case pretty quickly and easily: for vs forEach.

This is the 1001th post to this blog. Fittingly, the 1000th post was actually reasonably technical. Being late to the blogging craze I started on 25th January 2004, 2448 days ago. A average posting rate of roughly every 2 and a half days is pretty good – much better than I would have expected actually.

I’ve been working to build a better filter for pasting from Microsoft Word into TinyMCE and if you know anything about filtering what Word calls HTML, you know there’s an awful lot of work to be done. As such, performance becomes a real issue – ideally we’d like to be able to filter reasonable sized documents (10-20 pages) in under the half a second that users generally call snappy. Since filtering Word HTML is also inherently complex and we want to ensure the code is maintainable, I started out by developing the code in the most maintainable way possible, without regard to performance.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on a new bill just passed by US Congress that updates accessibility requirements. The legislation, called the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, covers things like captions on Internet video, Internet phone services that work with hearing aids, television menus that can be seen by people with vision loss and even touch screens that the blind can use. The bill, which passed by voice vote and will now go to President Obama for approval, updates existing regulations to bring them in line with the Internet age.