With more and more people embracing the idea of producing HTML5 mobile web apps, research like this is becoming vital. There are a lot of gotchas in this article, especially if you’ve been ignoring this space.
You should read the whole article, but I just want to point out a pair of findings before I send you on your way. One has been a known issue for a while (it’s a ySlow rule, after all,) but it’s still worth pointing out. The other… wow… my emphasis.
Results varied wildly across the three most recent versions of iOS. Astonishingly, Mobile Safari on iOS 3.1.3 did not cache components of any size, despite having an apparently unlimited page cache size. This is troubling since it means iOS 3.1.3 users are likely getting a suboptimal browsing experience, especially if they aren’t using wifi. The unlimited page cache size does little good here, since it only comes into play for back/forward navigations. This behavior is a significant change from what others observed in previous iOS releases and I can’t imagine any good reason for it, so I suspect this may be a bug.
Mobile Safari on iOS 3.2 (which is only available on the iPad) does not exhibit this bug. Its 25.6KB component limit and ~281.6KB total cache limit are better than nothing, but they still seem paltry compared to the other devices tested. Uniquely among iOS devices, the iPad appears to limit the size of pages in the page cache to 25.6KB, the same as its component size limit.
Here are the numbers for DrunkenFist.com in the year 2009. There were 614,333 visits to that domain last year and the top browsers broke down like this:
Once thing that’s vital to testing the accessibility of a web app or site is running through it without using a mouse. If you can successfully work a site or app without touching the mouse, you’ve gone a long way towards ensuring that your site is available to a wide range of people and devices.
One thing that’s difficult about that process is most of us rely far too much on the mouse when browsing. Which is where these lists of keyboard shortcuts for Firefox, and Internet Explorer come in handy. Read the rest of this entry »
I had a Safari bug on a project I’m rushing to get out the door. We’re using a Flickr feed to populate a div with link+thumbnail to some flickr images. In Firefox/Internet Explorer I simply did the following to build the links:
flickr : function(obj) {
//get the full list of items
var items = obj.getElementsByTagName("item");
//make sure it's not empty
if (items.length > 0 ) {
//start the HTML block
var blob = "<div id='flickrFeed'>";
//loop through the items (we only want 5) and build some links)
for (var i = 0; i< 5 ; i++) {
//get the link
var flink = items[i].getElementsByTagName("link")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue;
//get the thumbnail
var flurl = items[i].getElementsByTagName("media:thumbnail")[0].getAttribute("url");
//smash them into the string
blob+="<a href='"+flink+"'><img height='75' width='75' src='"+flurl+"' /></a>";
};
//close the div
blob+="</div>";
//pop it onto the shelf, for later use
$("hyperspace").innerHTML+=blob;
} else {
//if there's somethign wrong with the feed, go to default contentk
social.fallBack.flickr();
}
}