This past week Michael J. I. Jackson blogged about a realllly slick widget he'd written called Shadowbox. As far as I know, it is the first in what I would enjoy seeing become a trend: Toolkit agnostic "plugins".

We are proud to announce the beta release of the Dojo Offline Toolkit. Dojo Offline is a free, open source toolkit that makes it easy for web applications to work offline. It consists of two pieces: a JavaScript library bundled with your web page and a small (~300K) cross-platform, cross-browser download that helps to cache your web application's user-interface for use offline. This is an early-access program, so there are a few bugs, but we have made tremendous progress - it's time to get the beta out the door.

wahoo! Server-side Dojo!

It arrived a while ago with very little fanfare, but I thought I should probably announce that Dojo does, in fact, support inline VML! It happened about 2 months ago--essentially we sniff for IE/Win and add the two required pieces in order for Internet Explorer to correctly render VML markup, all without touching your existing code. This has been tested (privately) with the Chart widget, and there will be a data visualization demo to show it off. Now if you want to write Dojo widgets incorporating or using VML, you can.

The Dojo team burns a lot of midnight oil fighting browser quirks and "special features". We could make things a lot easier on ourselves by just committing to supporting fewer browsers, but we feel very strongly that it's better for the health of the web that all modern browsers get a shot at displaying responsive, degradable-by-default UIs.

Torrey has implemented what I believe to be the first implementation of Dojo inside a desktop IM client, in this case Adium.