Thanks of the link on the compression stuff, I’ve read about the YUI compressor, but I haven’t ever used any of the compression software for the stuff I’ve written.

It has a bunch of decent widgets, but most of it is stuff I don’t really need.

Anyway, what I meant about the gzip stream — you can actually compress scripts and css with gzip and most (if not all) modern browsers will decompress it on the client side.

http://www.julienlecomte.net/blog/2007/08/13/

That page has a link to a PHP script that will handle it if you have the zlib extension enabled. There’s also an Apache extension (mod_gzip) that will handle all of it for you.

I may end up mixing Dojo with other libraries, since I think some of their stuff looks pretty cool, however, 5.6 seconds is way too slow. If I remove the grid it usually loads pretty quickly (I don’t have any exact numbers though), so I might look into using a grid-like control from another framework.

It’s interesting that you bring up Ext JS. The same publishing company that gave me the Dojo book recently offered me a book on Ext JS. I’m guessing they’re doing this as part of a grass roots campaign. Since it’s a good excuse to learn another framework I took them up on the offer. I may end up doing my own Dojo / Ext JS comparison, though right now I’ve barely even started this new book. It sucks to hear you weren’t impressed with Ext JS though.

jQuery is something I really want to learn. Eventually I’ll get to it.

1.6mb is still pretty big for scripts though. Your app takes 5.6 seconds to load on my slow work computer. I’ve always found Dojo to be a bit slow — it takes about 2 full seconds to sort a column on that datagrid wijit.

Maybe the newer versions (with the Sizzle core) will be faster? A year or so ago, I was looking at Dojo and ExtJS for a rich app. I ended up not doing the project, but I wasn’t very impressed with either lib. I hate to plug jQuery again…but it really is that good.

As for syntax, some of it would be easy to parse, but when I start doing that, I start getting a little into the research side of things (which is good and bad) since there doesn’t seem to be any clearly developed metrics on how to differentiate styles. Finding the frequency of adverbs might be interesting though.

http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2002/0172.html

It depends. For example:

- Commas after conjunctions like “and”. Some people use them in a series, some don’t.

- Contractions – Some don’t & some ‘do not’.

- The use of ‘that’ as opposed to’which’.

- The number of prepositions per sentence.

- The frequency of adverbs (look for -ly words).

These ought to be easier look for.

As for Don Foster. Yeah… I think his ego got the better of him. He seems to have a tin ear for intangibles too. Anybody familiar with Shakespeare knew that the Funeral Elegy didn’t *sound* like Shakespeare. Every writer possesses a certain sound that his hard to quantify and nearly impossible (it would seem) to translate for a computer.

Examining the syntax would be kind of hard, I’d have to think awhile before I decided to do that (to see if it was worth it and to come up with a fast technique).

Keep me up do date on your work. This stuff fascinates me. I didn’t know about Bookish Math – I’ll have to read it. I come at it from the Shakespeare side. About three or four years a long lost “Funeral Elegy” was declared Shakespeare’s by Donald Foster. It caused a huge controversy. The Elegy was eventually identified as being by John Ford. (I was among the first to say it was by Ford – but not being *in* with Shakespeare Scholars – I’m just a carpenter hack – I got and get no credit.

Donald Foster, in the meantime, went down in flames – in an ugly way. He used a program called Shaxicon to identify the Funeral Elegy – claiming that the stylometric analysis “proved” it was by Shakespeare. Foster, presumably in a petulant fit of pique, never released Shaxicon into the public sphere after “his” assertions were roundly and soundly “debunked”. Shakespeare scholars are a vicious bunch, let me tell you…

Google “Donald Foster” and Shaxicon, you may turn up some interesting stuff.

I’ve read the book by Brian Vickers (mentioned in the article you linked to). Common words is a starting point, but the use of conjunctions, prepositions and certain syntactic constructions comes next. That’s hard to program into a computer.

If I had your software, I would analyze Funeral Elegy and a random patch of Shakespeare – as a sort of control.

But…

Gotta’ get to work.

Patrick Gi… forget it, you know my name…