The recent massive improvements in JavaScript performance are absolutely awesome for a number of reasons:

1. When I use a Web app, it will be much faster, and more responsive
2. Microsoft and Adobe should be scared, as JS may just prove to be the true open-source competitor to Silverlight and AIR.
3. It will pave the way for more advanced, cross-platform Web apps.
4. Hopefully, as the speed difference between old and new browsers becomes more apparent, it will speed up the switchover from the horrors of IE6.  New apps will start to support IE6 less and less, as the performance hit will be unacceptable.
5. It could help attempts to piggyback certain technologies that Microsoft will probably never support (such as Canvas), onto IE.  Of course, this assumes that MS keeps up with the curve regarding JS performance.

And on a completely unrelated note, I found a cool page that beautifully sums up the options for IE when it comes to exploiting CSS hacks.  Whilst I knew most of the hacks on the page, this inline rule was quite interesting:

style=”*background:red!important;background:white!important;background:blue;”

The first background rule applies to IE7 only, the second to all other (more advanced) browsers, and the last one to IE6 only.  While inline CSS is not good for obvious reasons, I have found this hack to be quick and useful when restricted by bad design in some of our older sites.

Edit: This can also be used in external CSS files, as shown by this neat tutorial.  Furthermore, it shows that we can combine the star hack (applies to IE6 and 7) with the underscore hack (applies only to IE6), to produce a more streamlined version of this style attribute:

style=”*background:red;background:white;_background:blue;”

No Comments »

Just a few things changed:

• New menu – not finished but looking a lot better. Found a good workaround for the IE7 ‘current page’ CSS issue Edit: More menu improvements but the IE7 current page tab appearance (z-index) bug is back. Annoying. Edit #2: Finally fixed it for good with an overlay image and some CSS tweaking – this seems to be the way that most sites utilising similar menus make them work in all browsers.
• JS animations courtesy of JQuery . House now fades, menu tabs are ‘pulled up’ on hover, content togglers slide nicely
• Minor improvements to house image
• Content ‘sanitised’ to take account of potential humour deficiency
• Sidebar pics added – some of these will change, and some will be randomised once I finalise how best to go about hooking a PHP image randomisation routine up with the existing Smarty templates.
• Some minor validation errors fixed
• More CV tweaking

Whilst I’m thinking about IE7 CSS bugs, I found this great page with loads of bug reports and testcases. Not too many workarounds, but it’s nice to know that the bizarre behaviour you’ve seen in IE7 has actually been reported by someone else as a bug. The site also has sections on IE6, Opera and Mozilla.

Next thing to do is fix the CSS and JS generation script so that it generates the files less frequently – At the moment lots of hits will probably result in a dead Dreamhost server.

No Comments »