Knowing what element was targeted in backbone.js View events

I've recently had a project that I have been slowly progressing for a while demand more of my attention, and it's a prime candidate to finally familiarise myself with backbone.js given the heavy javascript usage involved. So far, so good - despite initial confusion regarding just what advantages it would offer, backbone.js certainly seems to be delivering on its promise of an alternative to unstructured jQuery mess. However, just as things seemed to be going smoothly, I came across a rather frustrating roadblock - how on earth do I know what element was targeted in a backbone.js View's event handling function?

Mapping URL anchors to AJAX actions without a JS framework

There is no doubting the dominance of AJAX heavy webapps/websites in recent times when it comes to looking at what is working well on the web - done right, they are easy and powerful to use. However, from a developer's perspective, it can be difficult to design asynchronous events and actions within the framework users expect from a browser - expectations such as being able to traverse actions via the back and forward browser buttons, and being able to represent current event state in the webapp via a URL. To address this issue, many Javascript frameworks and packages have been developed, some of which are exceedingly popular, but in this article I will cover a quick way to introduce these capabilities to your AJAX driven projects without requiring you to conform your entire Javascript codebase into a framework.