Bobby van der Sluis continues the cross-blog conversation in his article, Presentational JavaScript.

This article describes a concept called presentational JavaScript and explains why it is important to separate presentational JavaScript from behavioral and structural JavaScript.

As I've said before, it's nice to see finally people looking at JavaScript without the disdain and with the same theoretical outlook that people have been using on CSS and HTML for a few years now.

A new fun little game from JavaScripts.com: Sparkles Battle Simulator. It's got some bugs, and it's clearly written by someone who's native language wasn't English, but hey, you're using just JavaScript to hack away at demons, so what do you expect?

Unfortunately, by giving the Web page a .txt suffix, they've made it so that it won't work in some browsers, but you can always copy and paste the code (oh wait, you can't—the comments say to not do that!) to try it out yourself.

In the latest edition of Web Page Design for Designers, there's a new article on Dynamic CSS animation. It's a continuation of last month's film-strip rollovers article, and the end results (seen in the Dual Dial demo here and the Digital Timer demo here) are nothing short of amazing. It'll make you rethink news tickers and UIs.

Dave Shea was considering adding JavaScript capabilities to the CSS Zen Garden, and much discussion ensued. He (unfortunately, imo) decided against it, but the discussion itself and his reasons for his decision are well worth checking out. And of course, the Garden itself is always amazing. Here's an example of what might have been.

You know VBScript, and miss some of its functionality in JavaScript? You know JavaScript, but think that it's string handling leaves something to be desired? Check out VB String Functions in Javascript, a handy library of string functions (e.g., trim, lcase, format, etc).

Sasha at CodeGrrl needs your help!

Okay, so here is the deal on the non-updating of CodeGrrl. With everything that's going on in my personal life and with running my own business, I do not have the time or the energy it takes to update this site. Contrary to what some people think, answering support requests is very tiring and frustrating, and I just don't have the patience for them right now. So, I will be taking on some more staff here at CodeGrrl to help with the maintenance of this site.

There's more info here to check if you're a good fit.

Via the Open Source Blog, I heard about jEdit, an open source text editor. It's written in Java, so it runs under OS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows. While I'm a big fan and long-time user of BBEdit, there's still a few things it doesn't do that I wish it did (CSS syntax checking?), so if you're also not 100% happy with your editor, you might want to check out jEdit too.

Steve at SlayerOffice just keeps doing the coolest things lately, making my blogging job easy. His latest is this scrolling menu.

This takes a regular list of twenty items, places them in a 60 pixel tall container element with a hidden overflow and allows for scrolling the data up and down in a sort of "bouncy" manner, as well as expanding the list in a fluid, animated motion.

In Simon Willison's Weblog, he takes a look at the Curious Javascript in .NET. He's right: it's pretty hard to look at this code and not come to the conclusion that MS either doesn't know how to write JavaScript or is actively trying to make things work best in IE/Win. Or most likely, in my opinion, both.

Sometimes I complain, and other times I compliment; here's one of the latter. The slide show at SlayerOffice is just waaaay cool. Here's Steve's description of how it came to be:

I was surfing around last night and wound up on Travis Beckham's podLob, an incredible site full of extremely good Flash and DHTML experiments.

As you know, I am a big fan of rewriting Flash stuff in DHTML, so naturally I was intrigued by the possibilities that Mr. Beckham's site offered for experimentation of my own.

One piece in particular that I liked very much was a Flash application he calls "Image Viewer", which you'll find linked on his site on the right side of the page, listed as #51. It shows a series of thumbnails which upon being clicked by the user expand into their full size and slide across the canvas. Pretty neat.

So I've written a similiar one in Javascript. It works in MSIE 6, MacIE 5.2, Gecko based browsers (including NS6), Konqueror and Safari.

Opera, both Windows v7.2 and Mac v7.5, seem to be incapable of resizing images on the fly, so it doesnt work for that browser, though it does degrade quite nicely for Netscape 4. If I'm just missing something with the Opera thing, let me know.

In Firefox/Mac, I had to click Disable Opacity Transition, but besides that it worked fine. Check it out.

I love tips sites and tutorials sites, so when I saw that a new site, Tips 'n' Tutorials, had launched last Tuesday, I had some high hopes and was looking forward to checking out their first JavaScript tutorial. Well, it's here, it's called Making your javascript search engine friendly, and it's, well, pretty bad. Yes, putting your JavaScripts into an external .js page is a good idea, but the code in the tutorial badly needed some other fixes before that. And their Tips section needs some more work, too: at a minimum, they need to learn that JavaScript != CSS, and that trying to disable right-clicking is a complete waste of time.

In short: nice effort, nice design, but there's plenty of other sites that did this better five years ago (here's one: irt.org - JavaScript FAQ Knowledge Base). Bookmark one of those instead, or create a tips & tricks site that contains help for today's puzzled Web developers.

From Builder.com: A recursive, dynamic menu tree in ColdFusion and JavaScript. You can see it in action here.

Two weeks ago, I made fun of the then-current LockerGnome weekly Web Developer's article,
SCHOOL: A Systematic Approach To Cross-browser DHTML Support, Part I.

Last week, there was no Web Developer's article.

This week's article says:

Web Developers is a newsletter that comes out once a week (Wednesdays) and strives to provide you with tips, tricks, news, and information that will make you a better… Web Developer. (Didn't see that one coming, eh?) Maybe you, yourself, are a wise Web sage and you'd like to share your wisdom with the masses. Wanna write for this newsletter? Drop us a line!

Now I feel guilty because I may have contributed to the last writer leaving (and darn it, we'll never get to see Part II now!), so I want to help them find someone else. I'm busy, but maybe it's a job for one of this site's readers? Let 'em know if you're interested.

From the "Bet you didn't know this could be done using only JavaScript" file: Manic Miner.

Play Manic Miner in your web browser! Guide Miner Willy using LEFT, RIGHT and SPACE… The game graphics and layout are taken directly from the Sinclair Spectrum version. The completed project will feature a map and sprite editor.

The code itself is way cool, but I'm still lousy at playing these kind of games. What was your high score?

In this article on Javascript and Security, Simon Willison agrees with my point (see below) that JavaScript alone isn't sufficient for security, but adds a new bit: how to use JavaScript (with this nifty client-side MD5 encoder) to increase the security of a server-side password login system. Nice!