of scripting and web-coding

Building a mini snake game in JS is one of these things every webcoder should be able to do. Since I hadn't tackled that "challenge" yet (and mostly because I was bored like hell and wanted to code something without using jQuery for a change), I decided to give it a shot. This is very basic, but it taught me a two interesting things I was unaware of: it seems that a DIV cannot natively receives the focus, but a simple workaround to cope with this is to give the DIV a tabIndex value if you duplicate an array (Array.splice(0)), references are maintained (so as far as I understand, if you modify the original array, the copy will be modified in sync...sounds pretty weird, but I must admit that there was something fishy with the values returned during my initial attempts to clone an array) Anyway, you can find the result of that one-hour experiment at the following URL: http://www.manuthommes.be/toolbox/snakejs/ Note: Left/Right arrows to turn.

Although this was common practice in the early days of the Web, working with HTML tables when it comes to building a webpage layout should be avoided as much as possible nowadays. CSS offers all the tools that are needed to create perfectly dynamic and flexible layouts, so you really should only rely on HTML tables to present actual data. This being said, it happens that you don't have the choice, and that this just what I've learned recently in my work. In the context of a client project, the framework I've had to use (Peoplesoft, an HRIS system) indeed generates HTML pages presenting a structure quite "2000"-ish, consisting in a complex nesting of HTML tables. Moreover, each time you add a component on the page (via the system itself, not when hardcoding it), a system TABLE is create to wrap the object. This can cause obviously a lot of problems, but in this case, my problem was quite specific. A few pages of the system use a well-defined table layout :