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Maybe a better question is, why do long-established websites tend to look like long-established websites?

Maybe websites that have been around for a while tend to fall into certain design patterns, which may be a reflection of bureaucracy or other patterns that structured orgs fall into.

What looks like a startup website is merely the lack of that. Just a thought anyway.

Yeah, it's probably the gratuitous secondary sunburst being drawn into the background of that demo page. That's a pretty big PNG image (i.e. the size of your viewport) being generated. For smaller uses it shouldn't be an issue, but gratuitous use will definitely cause performance problems.

originEl if present overrides originX/Y. It wouldn't be too hard to build a similar tool that absolutely positions a canvas within an element, but there's a tradeoff in complexity. Setting a CSS background is a nice, simple approach.

Yeah, you can't zoom this page on desktop browsers. Although you can in mobile Safari. Chrome and Firefox seem to simply scale the underlying the pixel value in order to achieve page zoom, whereas mobile Safari seems to zoom into the viewport which, paradoxically, leaves part of the viewport unviewable.

However, desktop zooming should trigger any media query switches you've put on the page.

Thanks. I enjoyed watching that.

Interesting. And maybe not even just in the younger years. Having worked in a big corporation, where politics flowed thick, there can be a social perception that one who sticks his head up will likely have it cut off. Asking pointed questions is one way to do that.

However I've also noticed—among engineers where solid understanding is perhaps more critical—the culture can be different. There's still a general reluctance to admit you have no clue what a speaker is talking about, but when 'that guy' finally breaks the silence with the questions that were on everyone's mind, you can almost hear the sense of relief spreading through the group.

So do they ask questions because they're smart, or are they smart because they ask questions?

I'm not an expert on programming language design, so I was hoping someone can help me understand. When people talk about syntax, do they mean how bits of text are strung together to make programs; kind of from a down-and-dirty, implementation-level POV? As opposed to the more high-level thinking of the kinds of things you can get done in the language?

So for example, assignment of a value to a variable is a high-level "thing you get done" in a language, which isn't syntax, whereas using := versus = for assignment is a matter of syntax? Do I have the right idea?

> How do you know? A friend of mine works on visual effects

Any chance there's a link to it online? I'd love to see an example :)

Anyhow, the problem for me is less with still renderings, and more with natural motion, like a human walking or talking. Also, I'd love to see a realistic splash as something falls into the water.

It's a good way to break a view into logical sub-components, while still only exposing one overall view to the world. Really just a variation on data hiding and encapsulation.

I'd like to nominate private subviews as a pattern.

    (function(){
        var myPrivateView = Backbone.View.extend({...});
        app.views.Foo = Backbone.View.extend({
            /* use myPrivateView somewhere in here */
        });
    })();

> inescapable async-all-the-way down, which necessitates endless lambdas. In other languages it's possible to pick a point at which to invert control back to blocking-style

I hear you. Have you heard of iced coffee script ?(http://maxtaco.github.com/coffee-script/) I didn't sleep well the night after I read that.

> The lack of a strong set of standard control and data structures [in JavaScript] means that you end up typing many of the same patterns repeatedly

Care to elaborate? I'm not saying I don't have my own notions of what's missing in JS, but I'd like to hear your take, given your experience.

Cache poisoning?