Ah, asynchronous JavaScripts. Love ’em, hate ’em, but you gotta use them! I have quite a few posts here on this blog about this stuff. Starting with something I considered an interesting hack to emulate PHP’s require(). This was posted in 2005. (2005! That’s ancient. That’s only a year after gmail was introduced, and you […]

Warning: not practical blog post, don’t read, move on. So this is a post about a thought I had – creating rounded corners in IE678 by using roundness that they already have built-in, meaning the character O. But first: My opinion is that browsers that don’t support border-radius should never ever get rounded corners. Let […]

MHTML and Data URIs in the same CSS file is totally doable and gives us nice support for IE6+ and all modern browsers. But the question is – what about inline styles. In other words can you have a single-request web application which bundles together markup, inline styles, inline scripts, inline images? With data URIs […]

Reducing the number of HTTP requests is a must, sprites are cool, but a pain to maintain, so there come data URIs (for all browsers) and MHTML (IE6 and 7). I’ve talked about these things on this blog to a point where the blog comes up in top 10 results in search engines for queries […]

Browser sniffing is bad. But sometimes unavoidable. But doing it on the server is bad, because UA string is unreliable. The solution is to use conditional comments and let IE do the work. Because you’re targeting IE most of the times anyway. In fact IE8 is a decent browser for the most practical purposes and […]

One of the new features in IE9 is the support for the JPEG-XR format, which reportedly has a better compression. Is it something we should dive into ASAP? JPEG-XR The wikipedia article is here. This format is developed and patented (red flag!) by Microsoft (yellow flag! 🙂 ), it replaces the suggested JPEG-2000 format and […]

2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 19 This post is part of the 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the articles to come. Intrigued by Luke Smith’s comment and also Alois Reitbauer’s comment on the previous post about rendering I did some more testing with dynaTrace and SpeedTracer. […]

2010 update: Lo, the Web Performance Advent Calendar hath moved Dec 7 This is the seventh in the series of performance articles as part of my 2009 performance advent calendar experiment. Stay tuned for the next articles. UPDATE: While this post is an interesting study, the problem it solves turns out to be much simpler. […]

Like it’s not bad enough that JavaScript has implied globals (forget var and you create a global), but the browsers have decided it’s a good idea to add more pollution to the global namespace. This has been a source of frustration before with IE, it’s really hard to understand the logic behind it, but it’s […]

CSS hacks ⇓ skip if you already know about the star and underscore hacks For most CSS tasks, there are only two hacks that are straighforward to use, easy to spot and maintain (delete down the road), easy to understand. The star hack that targets IE6 and 7 and the underscore hack that targets IE6. […]

UPDATE: It’s very important to have a closing separator in the MHTML document, otherwise there are known issues in IE7 on Vista or Windows 7. The details are here. In the previous post I described what data: URIs are and how they are useful to reduce the number of HTTP requests. Now, the problem with […]

I’m a sucker for consoles. The ability to quickly type some code and see it executed right then and there… priceless. That’s why I’m a huge fan of Firebug’s JavaScript console. But what about IE? option 1 – Firebug lite Firebug lite is a lighter version of the proper Firebug which runs in browsers other […]

Yes, it does. Sometimes it’s convenient to use “HTML arrays”, meaning to name fields like: <input name=”something[]” /> Then on the server side you loop through the array $_POST[‘something’] This allows for a flexibility where your app doesn’t know the number of inputs in advance, but works fine regardless of the actual number. Even cooler […]

Say you attach several listeners to an event, for example you want a few things to happen on page load. What is the order of execution of the different listeners? You’d think that the listener attached first will execute first, followed by the second and so on… Well, yes, in FF, Opera, Safari on Windows, […]

Here are two bookmarklets that could make your life easier when trying to figure out why in IE a page behave as wrong as it behaves. For Firefox we have Firebug, so none of this is necessary. For IE we have also Firebug lite (see my post), but you need some setup before you can […]

So you know how to add external scripts and styles, using the DOM, after the page is loaded. And what if you don’t have external files, but have some style definitions and some JS code as text and you want it inserted and executed into a page. The DOM way “Ha! An easy one”, you’d […]

Let’s say you want to quickly try out some small stylesheet changes, but you don’t want to (or prefer not to, or for some reason temporarily you just can’t) modify your application’s CSS file(s). In FF it’s easy – you have Firebug and you can play with styles until blue in the face. And in […]

Update: A better version of what I was trying to do is here. It works around the cross-domain permission problems in IE by not loading a page in the frame, but putting there the actual content. Firebug – no words to describe how cool it is, really. After the recent new release (1.0. beta) the […]