You’re reading Jeff Watkins’ thoughts about Web application design and development with a little bit of technology ranting thrown in for free.
So imagine you’ve got this image of two cats complete with a nice drop shadow. One half of the image has a white background, while the other half has no background (indicated by the standard Photoshop checkerboard background pattern).
You want to display these cats programmatically on your Web site in response to some user activity. [...]
So let’s say you’re using SpiderMonkey (the JavaScript engine from Mozilla) to build a Web application server that naturally uses JavaScript as the server-side language. Naturally, you want to support XML, since you want to be taken seriously and of course, you don’t want to write your own XML parser, because libxml2 is really good. [...]