22 items tagged “libraries”
2025
AI-generated slop is already in your public library (via) US libraries that use the Hoopla system to offer ebooks to their patrons sign agreements where they pay a license fee for anything selected by one of their members that's in the Hoopla catalog.
The Hoopla catalog is increasingly filling up with junk AI slop ebooks like "Fatty Liver Diet Cookbook: 2000 Days of Simple and Flavorful Recipes for a Revitalized Liver", which then cost libraries money if someone checks them out.
Apparently librarians already have a term for this kind of low-quality, low effort content that predates it being written by LLMs: vendor slurry.
Libraries stand against censorship, making this a difficult issue to address through removing those listings.
Sarah Lamdan, deputy director of the American Library Association says:
If library visitors choose to read AI eBooks, they should do so with the knowledge that the books are AI-generated.
2009
Introducing Closure Tools. Google have released the pure-JavaScript library, apparently used for Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps. It comes with a powerful JavaScript optimiser tool with linting built in and an accompanying Firebug extension to ensure the obfuscated code it produces can still be debugged. There’s also a template system which precompiles down to JavaScript and can also be called from Java.
YUI 3.0.0: First GA Release of YUI’s Next-Generation Codeline. YUI 3 has some very neat ideas—everything is dynamically loaded, so you start with a tiny bootstrap script and call YUI().use(’module-name’) to load just the code you need. Congratulations to the team.
John Resig on Glow. John criticises Glow for reinventing the wheel—BBC insiders respond in the comments below.
2008
If we see good usage, we can work with browser vendors to automatically ship these libraries. Then, if they see the URLs that we use, they could auto load the libraries, even special JIT'd ones, from their local system. Thus, no network hit at all!
Google AJAX Libraries API (via) Google are hosting copies of jQuery, Prototype, mooTools and Dojo on their CDN, with a promise to permanently host different versions and an optional JavaScript API to dynamically load the most recent version of a library. I wish they’d stop capitalising Ajax though.
Doctype: /trunk/goog. Google’s newly released JavaScript library (pure JavaScript, so more along the lines of YUI and jQuery than GWT). I haven’t found the documentation for it yet, but the code is extremely well commented. UPDATE: The documentation is spread throughout Doctype.
querySelector and querySelectorAll. WebKit now supports the W3C Selectors API. Expect the various JavaScript libraries to add this as an optimisation to achieve massive speedups (Prototype are already working on it).
Low Pro For jQuery? Dan Webb on why he prefers Prototype over jQuery: “The one big reason was that, while jQuery was super simple and concise when working on smaller projects, it offered no help in structuring larger applications”.
jQuery 1.2.2: 2nd Birthday Present. The API stays the same, but there are some healthy speed improvements, a new way of adding custom events and (most importantly) .ready() now waits for the CSS to be ready in addition to the DOM.
2007
YUI 2.4.0 released. Lots of great new features, but the one I’m most excited about is Selector: YUI finally has a CSS query engine.
dojo.NodeList API docs. Support in Dojo for jQuery-style chaining operations.
Upgrading to Prototype 1.6: real world examples. I still don’t find Prototype as intuitive as jQuery, but the API improvements between 1.5 and 1.6 are very impressive.
Protoscript (via) JavaScript tool designed for easy prototyping of JS interactions; powered by YUI and jQuery.
Building a JavaScript Library. Slides from John Resig’s Google Tech Talk. Some great tips in here, including: make your APIs orthogonal, look for common patterns, keep things extensible and write the documentation yourself.
jQuery for JavaScript programmers
When jQuery came out back in January 2006, my first impression was that it was a cute hack. Basing everything around CSS selectors was a neat idea (see getElementsBySelector) but the chaining stuff looked like a bit of a gimmick and the library as a whole didn’t look like it would cover all of the bases. I wrote jQuery off as a passing fad.
[... 2,608 words]MooTools is not compatible with any other javascript framework. If you "definitely need to work with prototype" (which you don't, since the frameworks each provide all the functionality you need to use only one or the other) then learn how to do what you want to do in prototype. Otherwise, learn to use MooTools to do all the things you want to do. They simply do not work together, and I promise they never will.
Dojo 0.9 Update. Big changes are under way in the Dojo camp.
Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.
base2. Dean Edwards’ new JavaScript library which adds useful cross-browser features based on upcoming DOM standards (the Selectors API, DOMContentLoaded, addEventListener and more).
Rules For JavaScript Library Authors. The guiding principles behind Dean Edwards’ base2 library, entirely applicable to every JavaScript developer.
2006
Notes on JavaScript Libraries
@media 2006 was a blast. Great talks, great people and some of the highest production values I’ve ever seen at a conference (check out the bags!).
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