PUBLIC MARKS from amyrussell with tag google

Ionut Alex Chitu of Google Operating System posted yesterday about Gmail's evolution from internal beta to public beta to today's constantly-evolving-but-still-beta version. Gmail's Humble Beginning never uses the phrases "agile software development" or "user experience design."

I've had this thing around for nearly two years and have just not known what to do with it. Google was doing a pretty good job with search results as long as a topic didn't have a profit motive associated with it.

The dudes at Java Developers Journal (JDJ, for you acronym hipsters) has always had a hard-on for conspiracies involving Microsoft and Java. "Embrace and extend" is a mantra akin to the Dalek's "Exterminate!" in their editorial corridors. Now they see a conspiracy in Google Android.

Over the weekend my Gmail finally got upgraded to the new version. (I know, I know, a week is hardly a long time to wait for a slow-rollout Google feature. But I'm impatient.) I have to say, the history and back-button support is AWESOME. It's funny that Gmail warns you in a huge red banner to disable Firebug. I, of course, kept it enabled and immediately began digging through the DOM of the new UI. As usual, most of the JavaScript is so obfusticated that it's hard to tell what's going on. Still, it's interesting to dig through layers and layers of iframes and nested divs and see how much DOM hackery is involved. Looking behind the scenes at any commercial-grade webapp is like taking a tour of a sausage factory.

Even though it's on a slow rollout and has reached only a handful of users, Gmail's new UI has already earned tons of coverage. The new Gmail boasts a fast new JavaScript architecture, an improved contact manager and a host of interface tweaks, all of which I'm dying to see and use. But the feature that excites me the most is back-button support.

Over one year ago, Eric Picard wrote an excellent article reviewing the issues with Ajax and Internet advertising standards: The current IAB impression-counting guidelines don't provide specific guidance on this topic. But they do offer general guidance on pages where advertising is automatically refreshed or reloaded. In the current audit process, every page that automatically refreshes will be treated as a unique case. The publisher must prove to the auditor that its business rules are justified. This means an immense amount of work on all sides during an audit, and decision-making criteria for every ad refresh scenario must be documented ahead of time for the auditors.

There's a short article over at softwaredeveloper.com on incorporating the Ajax without breaking your Google friendliness. They have a few concrete tips:

A little over a year ago, Ajaxian published an editorial entitled Google Web Toolkit: The correct level of abstraction? In it, Dion raised some important questions about GWT: * Isn't debugging generated Javascript going to be messy? * Wouldn't the large size of the generated Javascript make it's use infeasible? * Where is all of the cool stuff, like effects libraries, etc.? * Is generating "assembler" in Javascript really the right level of abstraction?