Slashdot Mirror

This seems like an ad for Contendo disguised as an inflammatory post.

Any webmaster worth their salt is using a variety of tools to improve loading speed - minification of html/css/js, combining scripts, CSS optimization, js packing, compressing PNGs with better tools and using CSS sprites.

I use W3 Total Cache for two of my blogs and the speed increase is substantial.

While we are at it, I wish developers would think it through before using JQuery for trivial stuff. Loading JQuery + bunch of plugins to do simple (and I mean simple) fades or form validations is pointless. Here's an example of what I mean.

So if they're doing this transparently, it's all th better.

Frameworks are great but they are also overused.
JQuery is fantastic if you're doing a big site that you want to feel like an app, but many people load JQuery just to do an image fade or animation - stuff that you can easily code yourself.

To add insult to injury, sites made with Joomla, WP, Drupal, etc. often rely on plugins, which use their own libraries. The end result is a site that loads JQuery, Mootools and Scriptaculous just to do some trivial effects that would be achieved just as well with document.getElementById(), setTimeout() and the element.style property.

The problem with doing things yourself instead of using a framework for common things like fades is that you have to remember how to code for each of the common browsers. The libraries hide that nastiness from you.

Frameworks are great but they are also overused.
JQuery is fantastic if you're doing a big site that you want to feel like an app, but many people load JQuery just to do an image fade or animation - stuff that you can easily code yourself.

To add insult to injury, sites made with Joomla, WP, Drupal, etc. often rely on plugins, which use their own libraries. The end result is a site that loads JQuery, Mootools and Scriptaculous just to do some trivial effects that would be achieved just as well with document.getElementById(), setTimeout() and the element.style property.

Canvas is already abused. Some/Many sites use it for font rendering - see Cufon and similar projects. Cufon was born as an alternative to sIFR, the flash method of doing the same thing.
Of course, the sane way of doing this is by embedding fonts, but that way has its own issues (licensing, quality of fonts, etc.)

In IE6 and later , you can mix CSS and javascript. I know, I know, IE is 'teh EViL' but the idea is pretty cool.
I've written about it on my blog, the idea is that you can write

#mydiv {
      width:expression( ... )
}

and it'll work.

Sometimes the layout can be very complex (especially with fluid layouts) and you need to mix relative dimensions (%) with fixed ones (px or em) so the more tools one can use, the better.

I don't get this laziness.

We provide services for a major insurance company. It would be disastrous if the Intranet and all the online software we've built for them stopped working because of a browser update. I've tried IE7 since beta1 (and believe me, they've changed the handling on CSS between beta1, beta2, rc1, etc.) and I made sure all the work we've done works correctly in IE7. Beta 1 was released in July 2005 I think. There was plenty of time to find & fix bugs, it's not like IE7 appeared just now out of nowhere.

I guess it's much easier to just sit back and do nothing but bitch and moan how evil M$ is breaking your application.

---
My Developer's Blog

Just to make it clear, Dreamweaver produces XHTML-compliant code and I think in the latest version this is on by default. Also, it comes with ready-made templates for tableless layout for quite some time.

If we're still seeing nested tables and sloppy code, we should blame the lazy designers and developers who can't be bothered to learn something new.

Using XHTML and CSS correctly leads to sites that are more easily maintainable - errors can be found easier, the layout can be altered more quickly, and since the document is actually XML, you can write a XSLT to transform the whole site (if needed)...

----
Developers' Blog

Open Source the player! If Adobe have coded the entire player in-house (which I believe they have), then why not Open Source it...it's a free download after all! Even if they've patented some methods used in the source code, they own the patents and the copyright on the source code, so that shouldn't stop them open-sourcing it surely? Just exactly what is Adobe's objection to open sourcing the player? Sheer bloody-mindedness?

Your arguments don't make much sense.

On one hand everybody keeps complaining that there's only Flash7 for Linux and Flash9 should be a top priority. On the other hand, Gnash "supports many SWF v7 features". Many, as in "not all of"?

So what should Adobe do in your opinion? Do nothing? Support Gnash team instead of their own player?
You're trying paint Adobe as evil (or at least that's my impression). I'm no fan of Adobe, but their efforts in this area should be at least acknowledged.

Armand (Flash fan)

Armand www.RichNetApps.com [richnetapps.com]

Mod me down if you will, but I've tried some of these apps, and I spent quite some time with Writely and Google Spreadsheets and I haven't been impressed at all.

Writely and the other text processors are at the level of Windows Write, a way to enter text with some rich text formatting. I mean, forget Table of Contents or an Equation Editor (things I use in most documents), where are rulers, the user-defined tabs or the footnotes? How can you expect me to take these web apps seriously when I can't even set the header or footer or page size/layout?

As to Spreadsheets... I can't even customize the cell formatting to include the Euro sign (€) instead of US Dollar.

Like others have said,this is all hype. It may be cool to play with them for a while, but I don't see anyone doing anything serious with them.

    Armand
    www.RichNetApps.com