It’s no great mystery that truly great user interfaces are the ones that are engineered to stay out of the way.

That reminds me of another quote I heard recently: “perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

A common example is working with checkboxes. How do we determine if the checkbox is checked or not? How do check the checkbox automatically?

In regular javascript, it’s quite straight forward:

var chk = document.getElementById("myCheckbox");
if (chk.checked) {
  // the checkbox is checked..
}

In jQuery, we cannot check the “checked” property of the element, since the element is actually a jQuery object.

var chk = $("#myCheckbox");
alert(chk.checked); //undefined!

Though the jQuery object does not have a checked property, the checkbox itself still has the “checked” attribute. So we can test if the attribute is true or false. Luckily, jQuery has an is() function which does just that.

var chk = $("#myCheckbox");
if (chk.is(":checked")) {
  // the checkbox is checked..
}

It’s very simple but just takes a little different thinking.

To “check” the checkbox using jQuery, you would again do it using the “checked” attribute of the input element.

var chk = $("#myCheckbox");
chk.attr("checked", true);

That’s all there is to it, really. Hopefully this little tip will help you out. Happy programming!

This is huge news. Friendfeed’s staff includes some ex-Google geniuses, including Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail and AdSense. With this acquisition we can only expect Facebook’s interface to become richer, its functionality more innovative and its aura more addictive.

Read the techcrunch article for more.

“This isn’t an anti-Microsoft campaign,” he said. “Microsoft makes some fantastic products. The latest version of their browser is a good browser. But with regards to IE 6 … [it] is an awful browser and no one should be using it.”

Read the full CNN article here.

His answer?

“Not in a million years will I post a classic ASP tut on this site”.

Ouch. Now I feel like I have to defend classic ASP… and I will!

Many people automatically think that ASP.NET is better than ASP. After all, it’s “.net”! That sounds cool – it must be better, right? Well, not necessarily. Here are a few reason why ASP is better than ASP.NET, and should still be relevant in today’s web design world:

Reason #1: ASP is simple; ASP.NET is not.

If you’re a web designer, you should know that the first law of usability is “don’t make me think”. This is where ASP.NET fails miserably. The main problem with ASP.NET is that it’s a massive framework, rather than a progamming language. So instead of just learning some syntax and function names, there’s a whole new paradigm to understand. It looks, feels and behaves unlike any other language. There’s so much going on that it makes your head hurt. It’s convoluted. It’s complex for no reason. This makes the learning curve a wall. I’m sure there are brainiacs out there who can climb walls, but I’d rather just take the stairs.

Classic ASP, like PHP, is simple to understand. The concepts are familiar and very easy to grasp, so you can concentrate on solving problems instead of wasting time staring at your monitor and cursing under your breath. In the end, you’ll get your job done a lot faster.

Reason #2: You control ASP; ASP.NET controls you.

When I do a view source on my website, I want to see the beautifully layered HTML, CSS and JavaScript that I coded, not someone else’s mess. If you are a web designer that appreciate W3C standards, then you have to hate ASP.NET server controls. They spit out lots of ugly HTML, CSS and JavaScript code into your resulting page, and leaving you with little control over style. They also take total control over the ID attribute of your element, so accessing it with #myelement in CSS, or $(“#myelement”) in jQuery, won’t work anymore.  In general, ASP.NET insists that it create client-side code for you. Not only that but it adds dozens of new files and folders to your web directory for no apparent reason.

With ASP, there are no surprises. What you code is what you get. You’re in control – and that’s essential for web designers.

Reason #3: ASP is portable; ASP.NET is a nightmare.

ASP also excels in migration compared to ASP.NET. When I transferred an ASP website from our servers to godaddy.com, everything went smoothly. I just uploaded the files, recreated the database, and changed some permissions, the site was up and running. Every time I move an ASP.NET application from one server to another, I lose a bit of sanity. Missing files, missing libraries, missing classes, different registry configurations. To get things working again takes hours, if not days.

Reason #4: ASP is light; ASP.NET is heavy.

Because ASP.NET loads a bunch of libraries and adds a plethora of random code, the result is that your pages are unusually heavy. That means pages load much slower – I’ve often seen simple pages take 8-10 seconds to load, whereas the same page coded in ASP would load in less than a second! A Microsoft MVP attempts to explain why:

“There is a great deal of work that has to happen for the application to start up – a worker process spins up, database connections get pooled, the cache is empty and has to warm up, ASPX pages get compiled, assemblies get JIT compiled. This can make the first couple hits a bit slower. Once the app is warmed up you should see performance increase.”

I say, why bother? ASP is light and quick.  For small to medium sized websites, classic ASP will usually out-perform ASP.NET. Yes, seriously.

ASP.NET is supposed to be more scalable than ASP – I guess I’ll take their word for it, since I’ve never developed a site that gets 1 million hits per day. But for small to medium sized sites, ASP is a completely viable solution. In fact, I developed Qiran.com – which gets about 40,000 hits per day – in ASP, and have had no major problems with it.

So why do people balk at ASP?

The main objection against ASP is that it creates messy, spaghetti-like code – but that should be blamed on the programmer, not the language. I’ve seen some pretty bad spaghetti code in PHP applications also, does that mean PHP sucks? Not at all. Good coding practice is universal to all languages. You can have good code in ASP, just like you can have bad code in ASP.NET or PHP.

With important advancements in design philosophy, JavaScript and CSS, I believe the choice of server-side language is less of an issue. The real issues are learning and implementing these modern practices in order to maximize performance and usability of your website.

For example, Ajax works just as well on an ASP site as it does on a PHP site – it provides the same benefits.  Caching increases the performance of your website, whether you do it in ASP or PHP. A PHP site won’t cache data any better than an ASP site – it’s the philosophy that matters.

I’ve gotten awkward stares from web designers when I tell them that I still use ASP. They don’t like ASP, but they have no idea why. “It’s old” is the only argument they can come up with.

But like the saying goes: old is gold.