Feb/10

Glow 1.7 release

0 Comments | Posted by Admin in Web Developer

Hi, I’m Frances and I work on Glow, the BBC’s JavaScript library, alongside Jake, Michael and Stephen. We’re looking forward to keeping you up to date on what’s going on with the project on this lovely new web developer blog.

The big news this week is that we’ve released Glow 1.7.0, which is now available to download. This release focuses on stability and overall usability; we’ve fixed a number of bugs, added handy new features to the DOM module, and improved accessibility for some of the widgets. Here’s a quick overview…

The core glow.dom.NodeList class gets a range of new methods:

ancestors() – get all the ancestors of a node
data() & removeData() – associate arbitrary data with elements in a memory efficient way
scrollLeft() & scrollTop() – get and set the scroll position of the document or elements
wrap() & unwrap() – add and remove parent nodes to elements

The AutoSuggest widget also receives a bit of attention. We have made a few UI bug fixes, changed the behaviour of the left/right keys to be more consistent with similar interfaces (such as Firefox’s search box). There are also some new events, the option to filter model data before it is displayed and an way to control the caching of data from URLs. You can also disable the text highlighting feature that is used by default when using the “complete” option.

Other changes include the addition of heading and list formatting options to the Editor widget, and an improvement to the glow.net module’s handling of XML returned with the wrong mime type.

Last but not least, we have also improved some of our accessibility features. The Overlay widget now prevents focus from going to other elements when set to “modal”, InfoPanel has better ARIA support and the Slider widget has more intuitive keyboard access for screenreader users.

Take a look at the 1.7 overview page for more details, including the full changelog.

If you’re interested in knowing more about Glow, or even if you’re already using it, we’ve got plenty of ways for you to get in touch with us: