Chapter 7
Chapter 7, Handling Buttons and Links, is now available! To me this feels like the chapter when the browser “becomes real”, with links, buttons, and tabs.
With this chapter the hardest thing was deciding what should make it in and what shouldn’t. In the earliest drafts, I didn’t have address bar editing—you’d click on the address bar and then enter the new address on the command line. But eventually I realized that focus is too important a concept, and editing the address bar was a good way to introduce that. Likewise, with tabs, I was worried that two refactors in one chapter was too tedious. But later, when I taught this chapter last fall, my students enthusiastically implemented tabs as a project, and so I added that to the chapter too. Adding also meant taking away—some of what was in the earliest drafts, like the forward button and address bar search, has now become exercises.
This is also the first chapter where you can run the browser, fromyour browser. This is a project we’ve been working on for a few months, and we’ll be writing more on how it works soon.
As always, please spread the word if you like what you’re reading; the blog is one good way to follow along. And tell us what you think! You can do so via Twitter, or via the feedback widgets in each chapter. If you are getting a lot out of this book, we’d love to know.