I am cranking through some code examples and plenty of research for this thing. It should kick incredible amounts of JavaScript ass. Come to think of it, it's a ninety minute presentation, so it better kick ass I'm going to look at load times, execution times, ySlow scores, codebase and add pure editorial commentary for several popular libraries (at minimum, jQuery, YUI, Prototype, and Dojo), as well as pure JavaScript and my own bare-bones library.

If you're a Boston JavaScript nerd, I hope to see you there.

Here's the description:

Our next JavaScript Meetup will be held on Thursday, April 30th at Microsoft Research Center located at One Memorial Drive in Cambridge. You should come to the 11th floor to be let in. There is also parking available at a cheap evening rate in the building.

Rob Larsen , Principal Presentation Engineer at Cramer, will demonstrate comparisons between raw JavaScript and utilizing the more popular JavaScript libraries currently available.

After the presentation | demonstration, we will go around the room introducing ourselves and asking the group for advice | opinions on any JavaScript-related issues members are facing.

Microsoft will provide pizza again. What a nice company!

Please RSVP and bring guests. We always have lots of pizza left over.

And the meetup.com link:

April Boston JavaScript Meetup Meeting – JavaScript Library Comparisons – The Boston JavaScript Meetup Group Cambridge, MA – Meetup.com

A question was posed in the comments on my JSON Feeds For Fun and Profit Part 2 – Callbacks with Twitter post about handling Twitter search results for a #hashtag. As with the rest of Twitter's API, dealing with search results is relatively straightforward. This post will examine how to handle a #hashtag search.

If you're not familiar with JSON or callbacks you might want to read the above referenced post to get up to speed.

Otherwise… it's on.
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I've run into an issue of nomenclature over the past couple of years and it's finally turned into a "thing."

What does one do with "things?"

If you answered, "write about them," you got it in one.
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Lost in the past few years of IE6 based stagnation (and ensuing developer angst) is the fact that the Internet Explorer team have come up with some pretty cool enhancements to the way we build web sites over the past ten plus years.

So, while we're cheering on Firefox's growing market share, hesitantly eying IE8 and waiting for the ugly stepchild of the browser landscape, IE6, to finally die a painful (and hopefully immediate) death, I thought I'd lay out some of the innovations introduced by Internet Explorer to remind us of relatively positive days gone by*.

As a fun exercise, while you're reading this, compare these innovations to the black hole left in the web development world by the long and terrible reign of IE6. It's an interesting juxtaposition of help vs. harm. Here's hoping future versions of the browser continue to trend closer to the "help" line as IE7 has and IE8 appears to be doing**
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With the recent release of Firefox 3, we've now got a full fledged, mainstream browser that supports the long-awaited, often replicated, getElementsByClassName method. This is good news as we'll all be just that much speedier as we ditch the various helper functions and go right into the browser for that functionality.

The thing is, the transition, when we'll finally be able to make it, isn't a one to one swap. In fact, depending on what you're using it for you could run into problems transitioning from a helper function to the native method.
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