Node Scope, Html Classes and more

Time for one of my typical listings of interesting notes/tricks/whatever that I want to have easily accessible for further reference.

• If you've ever been dubious about how scope between different modules works in Node.js, you should read this brilliant explanation, it makes it crystal clear

  Unlike the browser, were variables are by default assigned to the global space (i.e. window) in Node variables are scoped to the module (the file) unless you explicitly assign them to module.exports. In fact, when you run "node myfile.js" or "require('somefile.js')" the code in your file is wrapped as follow: (function (exports, require, module, __filename, __dirname) { // your code is here });

• I'd never been aware of how incorrectly I was using the term "CSS class" until I read this eye-opener. So I think we should speak like this: We assign html classes to html elements and style is applied to those elements by means of CSS rules consisting of a Class Selector and a declaration block. I fully agree with the author in that using the correct naming is not just a matter of being pedant:

  This isn't just pedanticism. By using the phrases "CSS class(es)" or "CSS class name(s)" you're not only being imprecise (or just plain wrong), you're tying the presentational context/framing of "CSS" to class names which implies and even encourages the bad practice of using presentational class names.

• One of my first thoughts after learning about CSS Animations was how useful it would be to create CSS rules from JavaScript, you can read a good explanation here.
• Even if you've never written a jQuery plugin you'll probably have wondered what the jQuery.fn thing is, well, it's that simple like this: jQuery.fn is an alias to jQuery.prototype (yes, in the end jQuery is just a function, so it has a prototype property). This explanation is excellent.
• I'll start by saying that I'm not the least interested in languages that compile to JavaScript, be it Dart, CoffeeScript, TypeScript... JavaScript is a beautiful language and I can't understand people not wanting to use it for Normal Web Development. Nevertheless, this asm.js thing is quite different stuff, it comes with the promise of allowing us to run in our browsers things that were not thought for the web, and at a decent speed. You can read this beautiful explanation by John Resig or this quite detailed one (but admittedly quite harder to digest)
• While doing a debugging session in Visul Studio and having a look at the Threads window I noticed that one of the threads was running with Priority set to Highest. I was not creating any thread implicitly, there was a bunch of worker threads being created by a WCF Service Host, so what could this be? Well, pretty easy, the .Net runtime will always create at minimum 3 threads for an application, the Main Thread, a Debugger Thread (a helper thread to work along with the debugger) and the Finalizer thread (and depending on the .Net version you can also have a separate GC thread). So it struck me that it had to be the Finalizer Thread that was running at High priority. This question in StackOverflow confirms it.