About a year ago, I wrote about my disappointment with Spry. Spry is yet another JavaScript library, this time from Adobe. My beef was with the way that Spry required proprietary markup and then claimed to be using Hijax. Roger Johansson also called them on it.
It looks like Adobe were listening. In fact, I know they were listening because not long after Roger and I published our rants, Scott Fegette recorded an interview with me that was split in two; one for public consumption and the other for developers at Adobe.
Version 1.6 of Spry looks a big improvement on what’s come before. Roger is pleasantly surprised and so am I. I’m glad to see that Adobe do listen to what we have to say but more importantly, I’m glad that they are providing solid documentation that stresses the importance of standards:
- Spry and Web Standards
- Progressive Enhancement with Spry
- Separating Behavior from Structure - Unobtrusive Spry
- Validating Spry
Documentation like this, which shows how to use code responsibly, is vital to any library. After all, it doesn’t matter how powerful or fast your code is if people then use it to break the Web.
Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge the changes that Kin Blas and his team are making. I was quite vocal in pointing the problems with Spry; it’s only fair that I’m equally vocal in pointing out the improvements.
Posted by Jeremy on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 11:49am
Comments
Kudos on influencing them in the right direction, Jeremy! It is essential to listen to your critics in order to improve your original thoughts/design on any project. More often then not, if you merely ask your market, they will give you the answers to your questions.
I did play with Spry within dreamweaver CS3 but I see there are limited spry widgets available so for. Hope to see they improve it further and add more widgets in future.
Life is too short for disappointments. Good article, thank you sharing for us.
# Posted by videolar on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 12:07pm
I have being playing with Spry for a while now but are having problems with instablilty , I hope there is a new release soon ;-(
Scott
# Posted by Scott Demaret on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 3:23pm
Sorry. Comments are closed.