Should You Use JavaScript Library CDNs?

Interesting reading. Here’s the salient bit:

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.

History of the user-agent string

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.

Comprehensive List of Browser-Specific CSS Hacks

I hate me some browser hacks. But that’s a mighty fine list.

Detecting browsers javascript hacks

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.