HTML Web App Development Still Has a Ways To Go 279
GMGruman writes "Neil McAllister was helping out a friend whose web developer disappeared. Neil's journey into his friend's website ended up being an archaeological dig through unstable remains, as layers of code in different languages easily broke when touched. Neil realized in that experience that the ever-growing jumble of standards, frameworks, and tools makes web application development harder than it needs to be. Although the Web is all about open standards where anyone can create variations for their specific needs and wants, Neil's experience reminded him that a tightly controlled ecosystem backed by a major vendor does make it easier to define best practices, set development targets, and deliver results with a minimum of chaos. There's something to be said for that."
Re:"a ways" to go? From a veteran editor... (Score:2, Informative)
'A ways to go' actually a colloquialism [wikipedia.org], so I understand your confusion.
Dunning-Kruger Effect (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"a ways" to go? From a veteran editor... (Score:4, Informative)
Colloquial/idiomatic.
ways
–noun (used with a singular verb)
way (defs. 7, 14, 20a).
Usage Note: ... In American English ways is often used as an equivalent of way in phrases such as a long ways to go. The usage is acceptable but is usually considered informal.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ways [reference.com]
Re:"a ways" to go? From a veteran editor... (Score:2, Informative)
The correct usage is "a way to go".
JavaScript Audio (Score:3, Informative)
How about procedural audio? Say I want to write a speech synthesizer in JavaScript. How do I send the samples to the speaker?
Well, it depends on if you mean "in the browser" or "in JavaScript." If you mean that latter, I'd probably fire up Mozilla Rhino [mozilla.org] and put together something using the libraries that ship with Java. Some of those are still available in the context of the browser via applets in a lot of cases, too, so with some work, you could probably do it in browser as well.
If you mean in-browser, no Java libraries, I'd probably have the samples in an array of bytes which I'd base64 encode and stuff into the src attribute of an audio, embed, or object tag as a dataURL. This likely wouldn't work in realtime, but then again, you didn't ask for a realtime speech synthesizer. :)
(FWIW: I know Flash 10 has an audio buffer explicitly for writing to programatically in realtime, and I agree it's awesome I agree a lot of the people going on and on about how great Ajax was and HTML5 is and how it all renders Flash totally unnecessary are generally not thinking about features like this. Just pointing out that there is in fact more than one way to do it and some of the other approaches have their merits.)
Re:"a ways" to go? From a veteran editor... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually ways is a pluralized singular word taken from an olde English word (1588) wayes. While it is the same as the word way, it does have very specific contexts that it is used in the English language, in both Queens and American English. Most people are just not taught it, and either pick up it's usage through general day to day speech. But either ways, it is just a reference to either the same idea or concept conveyed by it's non-pluralized brother as an adverb or noun.
Common examples are:
sideways - The hat sat on his head sideways.
If you tried the same sentence using the word sideway it just doesn't work...
Always - Not a fair example, but same root, same result. You will never hear someone say alway.
ways - (n) The old man is stuck in his ways.
- (adv) He had a ways to go, but he got there.
While the first sentence may sound correct with way, the proper word is ways. It is not a colloquialism or an idiom, but rather proper speech. The second sentence could be a long way to go, but again, the proper adverb when not using an adjective is ways, not way. Just one of those wonderful bizarre details with the English language. We have too many words for the same meaning, and the context and usage matters. In this case, it's a very old word we just use, and most people no longer realize there is a difference between the usage of ways and way. But, there is, in a very subtle context.
As a noun, it represents an idea of a pluralized singularity. All the ways are his. Whenever you try to summize a multitude into a single context, way becomes ways. Rare, but for some silly reason the context exists.
As an adverb, it again works to pluralize a single context. There are multiple ways for "it" to go. It, being the context of the verb, creates a singular entity to focus the ways upon. I am not aware of any other word that actually operates in that fashion, but I am sure they are out there.
And as far as as I am aware, ways is only used like this as an adverb or noun. At no other time can you create a context that can contain this odd scenario... But then again, I am not really that knowledgeable about the English language...