Saw some CSV polyfill stuff posted at CodePen. Did some CSV stuff years ago with VB6. It was quite fast, although the code wasn’t very short. That tends to happen when you have almost full control of memory and want to make things fast. With a language not designed for that kind of stuff.

This CSV element polyfill idea however is quite nice. The original author that did the pen linked above didn’t initially have any support for quotes. I wanted to do something that can take almost anything and still work, even if there are line changes within the quoted values, so I started bothering my brains with JavaScript. I’ve read about it a lot in the past few days (thanks to Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja), but I haven’t really done anything practical for a little while. So here we go:

Check out this Pen!

I have still some work to do. I haven’t read much about regular expressions yet. I know somewhat how they work but I rarely push my brain to understanding them in detail. It’ll probably be one of the more challenging parts of the book for me. RegExps just seem the kind of thing that works so different to my own brain logic that it makes it hard to “get it”. However for the first time in my life I actually have a good reason to learn it so I’ll eventually get my head into it.

The thing that is missing is single quote support. You can have multiple line values if you use double quotes, but that doesn’t work with single quotes. Not just yet. I want to have both supported the same time even though there probably aren’t that many CSV files that are so absurd that they’d use both! However CSV is a very “free” standard and it varies so much between users that it makes your head sore when you want to throw your best shot at supporting everything that people have done with it.

As I’m soon starting off as a “real” front-end web developer I decided to do something that is very unlike my usual self: I bought a book. After looking around for good candidates I ended up finding Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, and I must say this book is just the right thing for me. While I yet haven’t read the entire book and I’m only as far as chapter 4 I can already tell a lot of the stuff is really useful in giving the understanding of the whole nature of JavaScript that I previously only learned in bits and pieces.

For me the explanations actually go a bit too much in-depth and I’m perfectly happy reading only the code samples once I’m done going through some of the initial introductions to each concept. So I guess I’m ignoring roughly one third or fourth of the whole content of the book. This is of course not the fault of the book, it has to draw the line somewhere and giving a bit too much is often better than giving too little.

It is nice how some concepts that seem to be hard-to-do are actually quite simple in JavaScript. At the moment the most powerful new things for me have been apply and call. Some of the samples are quite genius and I can see how creating a fake (or custom) Array or wrapping Math.min and Math.max for arrays will be useful in the future.

I might return to the subject once I’ve read the entire book. For now I’m quite happy for buying this book as it reduces the amount of time I need to spend learning new stuff by trying things myself.

So, I wanted to do quite a retro design here. My very first homepage had green text on black background. While I have dropped the idea of having everything as green text to avoid having too much of it (especially as it is the link color) I have otherwise kept things quite simple. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time creating an entirely new WordPress theme so HTML is almost untouched in comparison to what you get out-of-the-box. That limited my originality and I ended up being happy with a very boring layout. But this doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to see!

I had quite interesting challenges when I ended up using pixel fonts instead of anything fancy and modern. The main problem was Firefox: it seems to be overly aware of subpixel rendering, to the point it even smoothes pixel fonts! So I had to be extra careful with the design to make sure all measurements are pixel perfect (no fractions), even if I do use em units for almost everything. This resulted into a bit of JavaScript (or to be precise, jQuery) to center the page. If I let Firefox to center the page element then it is most likely the page content ends up having subpixel positioning and that results in smooth fonts. So with a bit of JavaScript I do manual positioning and also undo default CSS centering with a float, yet the design is not dependant on JS.

The fonts I use are:

• Transport Tycoon (personally converted from TTD.FON by Csaba Varga)
• KreativeKorp Pet Me 128 and Pet Me 128 2Y (Commodore 64 style!)