“You can delay the execution of external scripts by placing them just before the end of the closing body tag. However, for older browsers compressed external JavaScripts are not reliably decompressed when they are placed within the body section, only when they are placed within the head are they reliably decompressed. So the defer attribute allows you to defer the execution of compressed JavaScripts, when they are placed within the head of your XHTML documents.”
—JavaScript: Defer Execution - with the defer attribute of the script element
January 2009
28 posts
“It appears that IE executes scripts in the following order: 1. All non-deferred scripts in order of occurrence 2. Deferred inline scripts in order of occurrence 3. Deferred external scripts in order of occurrence So it appears that deferring an external script, regardless of where it’s included, causes it to be executed after all inline scripts, deferred or not.”
—JavaScript: Defer Execution - with the defer attribute of the script element
“An object’s state is initially set to uninitialized, and then to loading. When data loading is complete, the state of the link object passes through the loaded and interactive states to reach the complete state. The states through which an object passes are determined by that object; an object can skip certain states (for example, interactive) if the state does not apply to that object.”
—readyState Property (document, FRAME, IFRAME, …)
“A behavior attached to an element receives both the ondocumentready and oncontentready notifications, but only after the window.onload event has fired.”
—ondocumentready Event
“The problem is that the window’s onload event fires after all page content is loaded. That includes images and other binary content. If a page has lots of images (or one big one), then the onload event may not fire for several seconds after the HTML content is visible.”
—Dean Edwards: Order of Events
“The ondocumentready event notifies DHTML behaviors that the document object is available from the primary Web page containing the behavior. Once ondocumentready has fired, a behavior can begin to manipulate the primary document object.”
—document Object (CUSTOM, window)
“Most DSL or cable Internet connections have asymmetric bandwidth, at rates like 1.5Mbit down/128Kbit up, 6Mbit down/512Kbit up, etc. Ratios of download to upload bandwidth are commonly in the 5:1 to 20:1 range. This means that for your users, a request takes the same amount of time to send as it takes to receive an object of 5 to 20 times the request size. Requests are commonly around 500 bytes, so this should significantly impact objects that are smaller than maybe 2.5k to 10k. This means that serving small objects might mean the page load is bottlenecked on the users’ upload bandwidth, as strange as that may sound”
—Optimizing Page Load Time
“Flash applications embedded in web page containers usually run in isolation, with the web pages little more than dumb containers. This article will demonstrate how to leverage the ActionScript external interface to enable bidirectional communication between the two.”
—Ajaxify Your Flex Application [Flash Tutorials]
Selector Shell →
selector-shell.appspot.com
CSS Selector Shell “is a browser-based tool for testing what CSS becomes in different browsers. It works by taking some raw text, inserting a dynamic STYLE element into the HEAD with that raw text as its content, and then reading the CSSOM to see what the browser has parsed it into. It is written in Javascript.”
COI - Browser Testing guidelines →
coi.gov.uk
A reference page for government guidelines on browser testing
isolani - Web Accessibility: The fallacy of too much accessibility →
isolani.co.uk
It’s not too much accessibility, it’s people not getting what accessibility is.
Web Access Centre Blog :: Too much accessibility →
rnib.org.uk
Classic series covering where well-meaning attempts at accessibility often achieve the opposite. Covers:
“how hard would it be to post a job offer or an ad to hurt another company’s reputation? Without proper checks and balances, the future of black hat marketing is sabotage.”
—Reputation Sabotage is the Future of Black Hat | Reputation Management - Reputation Monitoring
ISO 9241: Standards for human-system interaction →
userfocus.co.uk
Includes
Part 151: Guidance on World Wide Web user interfacesand
Part 171: Guidance on software accessibility
“I’ve previously found Factor CSS which reduced a 300 line file I gave it to 40 lines. But as one of our client-side team stressed to me, “Refactoring CSS is about making it more manageable, not shorter”. IntelliJ IDEA does better. It allows renaming of IDs, class names, etc, which is a huge jump forward, but far from the current state of refactoring in object-oriented programming. So refactoring CSS is important to us because of that manageability: this is software we’re writing for the long term.”
—niksilver.com » Guardian Unlimited’s new look: Some background on templating
“The problem wasn’t as much about the form’s layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product. The team saw the form as enabling repeat customers to purchase faster. First-time purchasers wouldn’t mind the extra effort of registering because, after all, they will come back for more and they’ll appreciate the expediency in subsequent purchases. Everybody wins, right?”
—The $300 Million Button
WaSP Community CSS3 Feedback 2008 →
fantasai.inkedblade.net
A CSS wish list. Particularly like http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/wasp-feedback-2008#grouped-alternates
Embedded.com - Mechanical vs. digital: a GUI isn't always the answer →
embedded.com
Shifting to a GUI from a formerly mechanical interface can have negative trade-offs.
Website Performance | CSS Sprite Generator →
spritegen.website-performance.org
Upload a .zip of images, set some parameters, and get a sprite with the CSS generated
“Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality.”
—smush.it!
“For the rounded corner dialogs, eight image requests were completely eliminated for browsers supporting CSS’ border-radius property. Additionally, the rounded corners are now anti-aliased in several browsers - a further improvement over the old GIF-based “jaggies.”
—Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Front-end Performance: Doing More With Less
