Hello! Burin

One of the side effects of depending on RJS is having a lot of unnecessary, ugly, and unsemantic (trying to stick with the u’s! ;x) markup.

First on our list for cubeless was to kill “div-itis”, an affliction many application developers suffer from(apparently). We had wrapper divs, clearing divs, placeholder divs, header divs, and divs sitting on the pages so that controllers could get a hook on to them — hooker divs.

Next up was to improve our hierarchical structure within the pages and just make our markup make some damn sense.

Another major task we did was remove tables for layout in a lot of places. These were scattered around all over the place with partials within partials with tables inside tables. I’ve noticed that it’s really easy to give up and use tables for layout, but giving in is like giving up on tests. If you do it, you make baby prophets cry.

As a side effect of following web standards on the front-end of cubeless we’ve cut down on filesizes, improved readability, and have again, brought sexy back.

Since the middle of last year we’ve peppered jQuery into a Prototype-heavy environment, and of course, it’s been playing nicely. We’ve been running on jQuery latest for much of the time too :)

This iteration we’ve started pulling out Rails helpers and have been using jQuery to hijack links and provide interaction instead. Our controllers aren’t spitting out as much retarded JavaScript, and we’re definitely very close to being able to rip Prototype out completely!

We had a smattering of JavaScript plugins that didn’t play well with other libraries, so we killed those and started using jQuery UI (datepickers, modals, etc)

In essence, we’ve annihilated a LOT of inline JavaScript, cleaned up controllers immensely, reduced filesizes, and pretty much brought sexy back.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been working very closely with Brandon Aaron on the front-end of cubeless. It’s been a daunting task, but I’d say we’re emerging from the trenches with a much better foundation for our product! By following the standards and principles that have been ingrained in our heads by standardistas, we’ve had a number of sexy side effects, although Mr. jQuery professional can probably elaborate more on that.