At the time of the latest release of Prototype a number of benign people,
mostly programmers complained about the alienating attitude the core team
has to the larger community and suggested some totally common –sense
changes in their communication like reflecting on requests in the wish –
list etc. Now I want to talk about the same from a different aspect:
correcting
obvious mistakes and a lack of discussion of the code base.
I have just finished studying the whole library and on the way came across
some issues that I wanted to discuss, or I found difficult to understand,
at first, or sometimes I also spotted some obvious mistakes that should be
eliminated.
My overall experience was quite discouraging as I found the mailing list is
very rarely a good forum for any real discussion, because a.) most posts
are from people with inadequate understanding of object oriented coding (
and often the basics of the language!), b.) there is very little
discussion of the code base itself and people are asking for some quick
solution or a recipe, c.) there are no overnight / weekly etc releases to
correct obvious mistakes that other php and other libraries do have and the
core team does not have ANY communication with the members..
I made more remarks, but here are only the ones about mistakes:
The example in the manual is clearly wrong for eachSlice. This was the
first thing I noticed right at the start still back in Prototype 1.6, but
it just stayed the same ..
Now there is a much more serious mistake in positionedOffset:
function positionedOffset(element) {
element = $(element);
var layout = element.getLayout();
var valueT = 0, valueL = 0;
do {
valueT += element.offsetTop || 0;
valueL += element.offsetLeft || 0;
element = element.offsetParent;
if (element) {
if (isBody(element)) break;
var p = Element.getStyle(element, 'position');
if (p !== 'static') break;
}
} while (element);
valueL -= layout.get('margin-top');
valueT -= layout.get('margin-left');
return new Element.Offset(valueL, valueT);
}
I bet, they wanted to deduce the margin-top value from the cumulative
topOffset and vice-versa, didn’t they?
Nevertheless, I am afraid it will again stay as it is even if this can
cause a wrong return value in cases when margin-top isn’t equal with
margin-left!! But, who cares?
Any professional tool like prototype is not perfect and naturally there
could be mistakes in anything that is more than 7000 lines long. To be
clear, it is not any merit nor a form of criticism if someone finds a
mistake, rather it should be regarded as valuable contribution to further
improve the library. Don’t you think so?
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