I always get a sinking feeling when Prototype starts to change. Sam (who maintains the project) is checking fixes for the next release today and Justin Palmer (encytemedia.com) is posting things that he’s seeing get checked in as it happens. On the one hand, the next version offers some nice improvements (thus far, there may be even more changes to come), but on the other, it’s stuff I’ve got to go dig into and incorporate into my work…

via ajaxian:
Justin Palmer has updated us with a bunch of recent Prototype updates including:

  • Chainability: A bunch of methods now return their first arg so we can change together methods 
    $('sidebar').addClassName('selected').show();
$('sweet').observe('click', function(e) {
    console.log("%s was clicked", Event.element(e));
}).setStyle({color: 'red'});
  • Form and Form.Element methods mixed in to $ and $$
  • Shorter syntax for Event Observing:
    $('element').observe('click', function(e) { alert(e); });
  • Backwards Compatability: Element.toggle, Element.show, and Element.hide no longer take an arbitrary number of arguments
  • Add serialization and observation support for input type=search
  • Simulate non-GET/POST requests by POSTing with a _method parameter set to the actual verb
  • Make Element.update() handle TABLE-related elements with the DOM API because of IE’s missing .innerHTML property on them
  • and many more.