Programming
I use higher-level scripting languages—Python, JavaScript and PHP. I plan to post several projects here but, for now, the only project available is my old EventX system (see below).
I started learning to program while studying at university. The main computer lab at school had rows of DEC terminals—mostly VT220s and VT320s, a single X-terminal and a wide format printer banging out reams of green-zebra-stripe tracked paper. 486s had "turbo" buttons, Pentiums ran at 60MHz and the Gopher/Telnet/USENET Exodus had only just begun. I was studying English but worked part time as a network support tech and computer lab assistant. At first, I simply dabbled—DCL for VAX/VMS, Pascal and C++—but later started coding more seriously.
EventX: Cascading Event Extensions
EventX is a JavaScript node-selector and event-binding engine. In 2005, tools like jQuery didn't exist and I was disappointed with the overhead of toolkits available at the time. EventX was designed as a light-weight, cross-browser system for implementing unobtrusive content/behavior separation.
I designed EventX to use with an early version of the Templar templating framework. Templar is more flexible now, but the first version used XHTML Basic content files and XHTML Strict template files without exception. XHTML Basic does not support the script tag or in-line style attributes. This fact promotes clean markup and enforces a degree of layer separation for structure, presentation & behavior. Unfortunately (or perhaps not so unfortunately), this technique necessarily removes the traditional method of in-line behavior attachment.
I wrote EventX to replace this lost functionality but it's an older script tested on older browsers. We now have tools like jQuery that are better options for modern web development. The EventX documentation pages remain available for historical and reference use only.