REM State

Overview

(Download Anjel)

Anjel is my attempt at making cross-browser Javascript a painless affair. It’s absolutely mind-boggling how many stupid quirks exist across different browsers today. Instead of requiring every Javascript programmer to remember and hack around every quirk on every project, I thought it would be nice if they could just (gasp!) code to a standard. Anjel allows programmers to code as if they were in one well-behaved browser, and takes care of coercing the ill-behaved browsers into minding their manners.

Javascript Developers

Probably the coolest part about Anjel, from the point of view of a Javascript developer who is using Anjel, is how everything just works. No fighting with 6 (or even more) different browsers to try and get them to all behave the same, no groaning as you have to apply the same hack-around to every piece of your increasingly-messy code, and no maintenance nightmares when you have to go back and add new functionality.

Anjel Developers

From the point of view of someone looking at the Anjel code directly, the coolest thing is probably the event normalization/simulation architecture. Essentially, you can direct Anjel to route real browser events through a single filter, which can handle the event in any way it pleases—even by throwing it out so that nothing sees the browser-generated event. This is coupled with the ability to arbitrarily trigger other events, allowing for unreliable compound events (such as onclick) to be simulated using more reliable primitive events (such as onmouseover, onmouseout, onmouseup and onmousedown). Furthermore, completely new events can be devised and simulated using this functionality, by routing non-existent events in the same way that real events are rerouted.