RightJS 2.2 Notes

I'm cooking a new evil plan for RightJS 2.2 release and would like to share some thoughts and notes, so you knew what's going on and where are we heading.


Native Fx

We are living in an interesting moment. Native CSS transitions are finally becoming reality. Safari does it, Chrome does it, Opera does it, FF4 does it (they promised they will include the feature into the 3.7 release). IE9b does not. Rumors has it, the feature will be in the final release, but I have my doubts it will happen.

Anyways, now, when the majority of sane browsers support the feature, I think it's the right time to start using native CSS transitions as a default option for our dom-morph effects. It is faster, simpler and more reliable.


Better UJS

The current implementation of UJS in RightJS works with an event target property only. The trouble with this solution is that when you have something like

<div id="one">first
  <div id="two">second
    <div id="three">third</div>
  </div>
</div>

and you attach an event listener to say the top one

"div#one".onClick(function() {
  ...
});

it will reacts only if the user clicks on the div#one itself and will successfully ignoring clicks on the inner element. Sometimes that's what you need, but in majority of the cases it creates more confusion than helping.

I'm still thinking about this one, but there is a good chance that the logic will be changed and our UJS will mimic the normal event listeners behavior and react on inner elements as well.

Hey! You will be able to make UJS stuff within UJS stuff! :)


Cookie plugin

At the beginning it seemed like a good idea to have a basic Cookie wrapper out of the box, but later I realized that on majority of my projects I don't use it. Well I assume you have pretty much the same experience.

So I think the cookie module will be kicked out of the core into an officially supported plugin. it's not much, just half a KB of gzipped code, but I guess we can fill this half a K with something more useful in everyday life.


IE8 And Pals

IE8, or as it known in some circles "IE7 on steroids" is kinda of troubling browser. The problem is that on a good half of the pages this darn things automatically falls into IE7 mode and therefore downloads the "olds" module, on the other half, it still has some troubles with native css selectors because some of CSS3 constructions are not supported, which consequentially makes some wonder-people to wonder how "right" right.js exactly is?

Furthermore the change/submit events still don't bubble and we carry quite large chunk of code in the core, to work this thing around.

So I was having that wild thought in my head, that we could ditch IE8 and pals support into the olds module so we could fix those things in there and not bother the core.

Currently, I'm considering the idea of making the line between the old and new browsers right where the CSS transitions support starts, which will effectively drop the whole IE support into the olds module.

That probably will make some jquery folks to moan that we are unfair towards them, but I'm looking into my glass ball and it says that after all the cutting and stitching, RightJS core size could drop below 12k.

Well, at least that the target. Besides there is still a tiny chance that IE9 folks will hear the voice of sanity and add css-transitions into it, then this distinction will be perfectly justified.


---

Anyhow, those are the notes and thoughts. Let me know if you have something on your mind about that