Fork JavaScript library launch

I'm excited about the launch of my new JavaScript library called Fork at http://forkjavascript.org with the MIT license. Below are snips from the front page of the Fork site...

Fork is a JavaScript library with Ajax, Events, DOM manipulation, etc. Fork is a general purpose library with a few bonus lines in the Ajax library specifically for use with Ruby on Rails however the library can be happily used outside of Rails also.

advantages

• an aspiration for the highest quality code
• author documentation
• in-browser unit/integration tests
• namespaced code
• does not augment JavaScript built-in prototypes
• does not add a layer of sugar on top of JavaScript to make writing JavaScript like writing in another language
• Is minimizable with jsmin
• MIT License

There are many JavaScript libraries out there. Why add another one to the list?

I like Ruby on Rails. The Rails default Prototype JavaScript library does not suit many development situations and contains code that makes developing for a wide selection of browsers difficult or impossible. Prototype has some great ideas in it's mix but the implementation quality has been questioned many times. Prototype has influenced many JavaScript libraries and some of Prototype's best ideas have also influenced the Fork API. Because Fork is a namespaced library, you may be able to use both Fork and Prototype simultaneously as you transition from one to the other.

I like the Yahoo! UI library. Of the JavaScript libraries I've used it has the best API. The YUI library has many valuable nuggets of information about browser bugs and workarounds. The code approach of YUI suits browser scripting well. However there are more than a few places in the code where I'm left scratching my head and thinking "why did they do that?" Maybe that is how every developer looks at another developers code. The YUI API is the starting point for much of the Fork API.

Most libraries seem to develop too quickly. API's are fixed from the first alpha version and code is not allowed to morph for the early part of it's life. I like the general debian attitude of careful growth because the browser execution environment is wildly varied and deserves a certain degree of conservatism in the JavaScript we send to it.