This is some pretty intense work, thanks! Wish they had thought about doing something like this themselves, would really help to have some supporting materials like this to go along with the audio.
While there are very confused and layered interpretations of what REST is, the reason it is important is that many of the Web Services APIs that preceded this trend used HTTP merely as a transport, but ignored so many of HTTP's features. This lead to them being difficult to use without bulky libraries. By using more of HTTP's features or basically HTTP as the API, it greatly simplifies and opens up possibilities and the tools that can interact with the API.
I don't see how, you're still having to calculate percentages at each break point. Maybe I'm missing something but it seems it's only saving you calculating the margin/padding. If you're using a tool to calculate the percentages for you such as http://semantic.gs/ I don't see how you couldn't do the same with less calculation and much less CSS.
For a large scale website, where not every page would have a video player, gallery, or calendar, why load that JS and CSS, which can be very heavy. The benefits are definitely there without having to declare explicitly that a particular page needs a certain dependency.
We're doing something similar with YepNope that is included in Modernizr but it's not as simple as yours. We ran into problems where if there were multiple elements on the page with that dependency (usually a jquery plugin), only one would end up getting initialized. We ended up coming up with a complicated queuing system that queues up all of the initialization requests when it detects that it is in the process of being loaded, and fires for each in the queue after the dependency is loaded. I'm definitely curious to look into your method in terms of multiple items that need to each be initialized and how this is handled with your context require method or require in general.
Ah, I've not had to deal with sharing between multiple elements yet - I'm kind of hoping that when I do require.js would give quite a solid base for it. YepNope seems like a good choice for this kind of thing, especially that it can bring in css assets too. Would be awesome to bring in all related assets for a element
I usually specialize and grab a lightweight library that does exactly (or something I can hack on) what I need it to. The closest exact replacement I have found to datatables is ExtJS. ExtJS has a pretty large learning overhead as well, but is probably more flexible in terms of functionality in the end and has a much more sane API in the end (with the tradeoff of it being much less easy to reskin).
On the other hand, a lot of JS frameworks have tackled a lot of the problems that I used datatables for except in a much better way. Things such as data storage and retrieval, dom manipulation, smart dom rendering. A lot of times I don't need to reach for one of these libraries anymore because the problem is already handled elegantly enough at the framework level. AngularJS in particular really shines here.
https://github.com/Mottie/tablesorter has multiple sorting using the shift key. I alternate between this and DataTables. The hungarian notation threw me off at first too. Far from insane though.
Here's an example of what you have to do in datatables to get the elements displayed around the table itself styled (such as a search bar, pagination, or table meta information)
So, in order to adjust the styling of DOM elements around the datatable, you need to understand a very specialized form of syntax that one particular property that controls all DOM element layouts accepts as a string. And there's only one example.
To control the structure of whats put in the DOM your are going to need something that looks like a template - so it's never going to be pretty and as soon as you choose any approach to templating it's probably going to upset a lot of people.
I agree that the syntax is a bit on the terse side - but it's not "insane" and at least it is there, logical and documented.
I don't find this a problem at all. What's indeed a problem is that it enforces a wrapper div that you cannot control using this syntax. Furthermore, plugins such as ColVis tend to be inflexible due to that wrapper.
I've been using jqGrid for a couple years now, and have been able to make it do everything I've ever needed. It is full of its own quirks, and probably hasn't been updated in a long time, but it definitely got the job done for me on many occasions.
I found Feedbin from Reeder saying it was going to support it, but find that the feedbin website meets my needs. Of all of the ones I've tried it was the first that seemed to refresh the feeds with seemingly the same frequency that Google Reader. $2 / month.
