I just wanted to point folks to the small project I started on Google code- Starter Assets.
It's based on some work I did at Cramer to standardize the development process there. The idea was to provide a standard set of files and a standard file/folder structure for people to start with whenever they were initiating a new project. I've expanded on it in this case to (eventually) include several doctypes (right now it's just xHTML strict- HTML5 will follow soon) and links to popular JavaScript libraries on the Google Ajax Library CDN (just jQuery for now.)*
To use, you'd just download or SVN export the folder that corresponds to the doctype/library combination that strikes your fancy and you're good to go.
I've released it in advance of a blog series I mentioned during my JavaScript presentation this past Thursday. It's a step-by-step tutorial on how I build web sites called, "Building a Modern Web Site." Read the rest of this entry »
Or, more simply: If we use Google’s JavaScript Library CDN, we are asking the majority of our website visitors (who don’t have jQuery already cached) to take a 1/3 of a second penalty (the time to connection to Google’s CDN) to potentially save a minority of our website visitors (those who do have a cached copy of jQuery) 1/3 of a second (the length of time to download jQuery 1.3.2 over a 768kps connection).
That does not make sense. It makes even less sense as the download speed of your visitors increases. Try to avoid serving 20 or 30 kilobytes of content at the cost of using a 3rd party just doesn’t make sense.
We've used the Google CDN to serve jQuery at Cramer with no obvious complaints and I heartily recommend using the configurator/CDN option that Yahoo offers (for the unitiated, it builds a "just what you need" package to grab from their CDN, so you don't have to serve every YUI Module just to do x), but Billy Hoffman's article definitely makes me rethink the former.
If you didn't live through it (and I didn't live through the whole thing), now you can revisit the strange history of the user-agent string in just a few, well-written, minutes.
We spent about 45 minutes running variations of the one-liners above in the console during a code-review last week. Fun times.
It sounded like this a couple of times:
"Wait, what?"
…
And finally… are you enjoying the jQuery advent calendar? I'm interested in running jQuery 1.4 against the demo code I build for my library presentation. I expect to be bowled over.
The folks at HttpWatch detail the ins and outs of the way that IE8 handles their enhanced connection rules. The browser is set to use 6 open connections, but only when a broadband connection is in use, so there are situations where it can fall back to using just 2.
Computer science in JavaScript: Base64 encoding
This is a great series, moving the discussion of JS beyond the browser and the DOM and into a more primary, and therefore really interesting, realm.
Thanks to Jason Duclos, my presentation from a couple of weeks ago is live. In it I compare standard JavaScript DOM methods to YUI, jQuery, Dojo and Prototype/Scriptaculous.
While I'm not a library guy in my day to day (more on that soon, I promise,) I do have some experience with YUI and featured it in my JavaScript library evaluation and talk in April, so it's definitely of interest when a major new release is pending. YUI is mightily impressive. Style-wise, the code is a little stiff/verbose for my liking, but the documentation, executions speed, logic and features of YUI are basically unmatched amongst the libraries I've evaluated. I'll be interested to see if 3 continues that trend and improves upon it. Read the rest of this entry »
