The last piece heralding the dawn of modern JavaScript (sometimes thought of as ES6, but we're past that now) arrived last month when two browsers (Chrome and Safari) shipped support for ES6 modules natively without developer flags. It's now possible to write all this stuff (modules, classes, arrow functions, const/let variables, Promises) using just your code and not relying on transpilers!
As promised, I have a tiny thing to announce here. I recently split off and refactored the code that deals binary data in kthoom into a new open source project: https://github.com/codedread/bitjs, Binary Tools for JavaScript.
The faster and faster JavaScript engines in modern browsers and the rise of new technologies like Typed Arrays, Web Workers, and the File APIs mean that browsers can actually be used to read in binary formats completely on the client-side (as long as native performance isn't a requirement).
For now the library includes two main capabilities:
- streams for reading in bits and bytes from a Typed Array
- unarchiving zip, rar or tar files (that's right, you can unzip and unrar in JavaScript now)
Oh, I forgot to mention a cool thing that happened at the beginning of the year while I was so busy: Wikipedia inched a step closer to having an in-browser editing experience for its impressive collection of vector image files via an experimental MediaWiki Extension. The extension was put together by Brion Vibber of StatusNet and WikiMedia fame. Fingers crossed for this to one day appear in Wikipedia! 🙂
I've been busy at my day job not launching code, but over the weekend I had some fun converting kthoom's unzip/inflate algorithm from using binary strings to using Typed Arrays. Typed Arrays mean native binary data that is accessible to JavaScript in the browser, making operations like unzip much much faster (like 4x). Read the rest of this entry ...
I’ve updated my marketshare spreadsheet for Nov 2010 charting the percentage of web users who can view SVG and Canvas: 44.57%
I'm also tracking what percentage of web users can see SVG in an <img> tag: 18.41%