This Week in JavaScript - 21 April 2014

JavaScript
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Welcome to your weekly update of JavaScript news and goodies.

Back to Basics

Creating a Simple Style Switcher - by yours truly
From jQuery to JavaScript - or more accurately, “From jQuery to native browser APIs”
Seven JavaScript Quirks I Wish I’d Known About
Closures: The ‘ringers’ of JavaScript - JavaScript closures for Beginners
A JavaScript Primer For Meteor - covers a lot of basic JavaScript concepts

Watching

The Goodness of JavaScript - a Bill-and-Ted-style ‘state of the union’ JavaScript address
The Birth and Death of JavaScript - covers JavaScript’s history, flaws and future
Understanding Scope in JavaScript - what “this” is all about
AngularJS and i18n
Controlling an Arduino with Node.js and Johnny Five

Tutorials

How To Build A WinJS App In 10 Easy Steps
Building 3D in the browser with Three.js
Creating a Node Web App With Hapi and Twilio Integration
Creating Your First Firefox OS App
How to easily manage your JavaScript libraries in a Rails app using Bower

Resources

Superhero.js - A collection of the best articles, videos and presentations on creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base
A List of Foundational JavaScript Tools - there’s lots …
es6ify - compile JavaScript.next (ES6) to JavaScript.current (ES5) on the fly.
YUI 3.16.0 Released - what’s new
Book of Modern frontend tooling - introducing you to the world of tooling for modern web applications

So what are your thoughts on the latest going-ons in the world of JavaScript? Do you have any JavaScript quirks to add to the list? Have you built a Firefox OS app you’d like to tell us about?

Please PM us if you have anything of interest for the next issue, and happy reading! - Paul & [URL=“http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/private.php?do=newpm&u=184222”]Pullo

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Most browsers can handle style switching without any JavaScript. You just need to include the alternate stylesheets in the HTM by specifying rel=“alternate stylesheet”.

For those browsers that don’t have the option built in you can then add a little JavaScript to make the switch

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That’s right.
In the article I didn’t really want to concentrate on the awesomeness of style-sheet switching (although this can be useful, for example by offering a high contrast style-sheet for visually impaired users), rather I wanted to write something about how to attach event handlers unobtrusively and how to persist state between page refreshes, as these are two things that I see people keep on asking in the forums.

Style-sheets seemed to be a convenient example that had a degree of real world value.