Slashdot Mirror

Page load time, you really want to download all the images, css, js, etc. all over again every time you visit a site ?

Static files really are static files:

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part-2/

seconded!

http://yuiblog.com/crockford/

Most people working with Javascript don't really know the language that well. It's easy to get frustrated that way, because JS's C-like syntax makes you think it's a C-like language, which actually it isn't.

There is a lot wrong with JS, nobody is denying that. But it also has its nice elements. And since every device on the planet is equipped with a browser running Javascript these days, the language really is here to stay. So instead of hating it, its a lot more constructive to try and understand it, so you can avoid JS's bad parts and make JS's good qualities work for you.

I highly recommend Douglas Crockford's video lectures on Javascript if you have to work with JS and want to really get to know the language. It helps a lot to understand why JS is the way it is and how to get the most out of it without going insane.

40-60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page views are done with an empty cache.

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part-2/

I wrote some JavaScript for a web game I wrote, just to take some load off the server: I did it quickly as an emergency measure, but I used the Prototype framework to try and make things easier and quicker.
Once I was done, writing it only for Firefox 3 and IE8, I found it all worked perfectly on IE6 (the simple CSS would look awful, but this pretty complex JS code ran first time). Since then it has needed little maintenance, has been extended by others, and works fine on all modern smartphone browsers (having been developed on and written with only Firefox and IE8 in mind).

There aren't many IE6-era standards which can still be used to do decent things: 99% of JavaScript sucks ass, but what's amazing is that the other 1% makes up for it so well. It could have been much worse (see ActiveX, VBscript, Flash, Java applets, for the alternatives championed with much more backing)..

It's just the old problem of a language being easy to write bad code in and/or a good language on a bad/inconsistent platform. Some JavaScript is a nightmare, and no-one would dispute that, but if you use a decent framework like Prototype, jQuery, or YUI, and don't try and write JavaScript like Java, you can write some very neat, concise, well-structured code.


As an aside: If you want something to show you why JavaScript doesn't have to be so bad (but not glossing over the awful stuff to avoid) check out Crockford's 6 lectures on JavaScript (much more than a dry guide to syntax).
He's also involved with the standards process and gives his commentary on the future along the way.

If they focussed on stripping down the size of the Javascript and CSS, and ran it through the YUI compressor, they could make a big difference to site responsiveness for everyone, not just mobile users. It probably wouldn't hurt their bandwidth bill, either. As it is, there are two CSS/JS files that, uncompressed, are larger than 25kb (and two others that come perilously close). Guess what? This means they don't go into the iPhone cache, and have to be reloaded every time.

I invite everyone to read Douglas Crockford's latest post on the YUI blog entitled: The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Premature Standardization

He gives some insight into how ES4 got to where it is today and its impact on standards in general

Though they were the logical starting point, I am grateful to be mainly past my reliance on books. However, based on how good his videos (e.g. http://javascript.crockford.com/, http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/24/video-crockford-tjpl/) are, I would consider checking this one out.

• Konqueror developers are considering implementing WebKit as the rendering engine for the next version of Konqueror, replacing KHTML (this would, as George points out, provide more of a bug-for-bug compatibility between Safari and Konqueror).

-- Lars Knoll and George Staikos on KHTML and WebKit

Perhaps they changed plans since then and I didn't hear it.

I'm not sure how they can do this, since as far as I can tell they "released" these design patterns a while ago.

Previous posts have mentioned Perl and PHP; seconding those for high-intensity search-and-destroy missions. As for software, you can't go wrong with TextPad, WinSCP, and PuTTY.

For best practices (separation of content from structure from behavior, mostly) keep an eye on are listed in and around A List Apart and the Web Standards Project. And if you're looking for several sets of outstanding presentation and behavior tools, check out the YUIBlog and the Yahoo! Developer Network. (Hint: their page grid layout, font normalization, and CSS reset libraries are an excellent place to start.)

Yahoo! uses it: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1 491221

They're using WordPress for their corp blogs nowadays, too, like http://yuiblog.com/.

Google uses PHP for their store, where they sell their Google Minis etc.: http://www.google-store.com/appliance/product_info .php?products_id=1

As stated it's^H^H^H^H BAD PROGRAMMERS left thousands of sites vulnerable to SQL-injection hacks and it's certainly not as durable and reliable as other combinations.

And comparing a non-profit site like Wikipedia, which has significantly limited resources, to a hundred-billion-plus company like Google is so absurd it doesn't even deserve a response.

http://yuiblog.com/
The blog to go with the (future) releases.