I’ve always been somewhat of a fan of minimalism when it comes to websites. The way I figure it:
Simpler + faster = better
Lately I’ve become slightly obsessed with seeing how much I can tweak a website to perform faster. In this case it’s my password generator SafePasswd.com, which I built in 2006 and [...]
Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category
Making Websites Faster
Where Is The Asynchronous AdSense Google?
Anyone who cares about website performance comes to the quick realization that ads are a huge slow down. They are also the source of income for many websites. I somewhat casually mentioned back in December that Google was beta testing an async Google Analytics call. I found a bug in the early [...]
Facebook’s HipHop For PHP
I mentioned the other day that Facebook was about to open source a method for speeding up PHP. Today they announced HipHop a code transformation tool that converts PHP into C++ and compiles using g++. There is apparently a server component to this strategy as well.
I’m slightly skeptical that this approach will [...]
Facebook’s New PHP “Runtime”
According to SDTimes Facebook is about to release a new open source project where it has either re-written the PHP Runtime (unlikely) or built a PHP compiler (more likely).
There is another possibility. It could be a Zend extension acting as an opcode cache (APC, XCache, etc.) and a FastCGI replacement.
It’s also possible they used [...]
JavaScript Flash Implementation
I meant to post this last week already. Gordon is a JavaScript implementation of Flash. You read that right. It’s written in JavaScript and executes swf files. It’s performance isn’t the same as the Flash player, but it’s surprisingly good.
This is really cool stuff. With JavaScript performance improving people are [...]
The Future Of SSL
Google announced the other day that it will now enable HTTPS by default on Gmail. Previously a user had to either manually type in HTTPS or change a setting to default to it, something most people likely never bothered to do. Google says it’s not related but it seems oddly coincidental that this [...]
Microsoft Joins W3C SVG Working Group
Microsoft is joining the W3C SVG Working Group. Presumably that means there’s some interest in SVG for IE or Silverlight or both. I wonder what led to the change of heart.
I pretty much wrote off any chance of SVG being mainstream in 2005 when Adobe bought Macromedia. Adobe was previously somewhat of [...]
Adventures With document.documentElement.firstChild
Here’s an interesting DOM test-case I ran across inadvertently yesterday.
For the purpose of this post assume the following markup:
< !DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<!– i broke the dom –>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<title>Testcase</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Something</p>
</body>
</html>
If I use document.documentElement.firstChild I don’t get consistent behavior. In Firefox and IE I get the <head/> element, which is what I [...]
Google Is Moving Away From Google Gears
LA Times is reporting:
“We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites,” wrote a Google spokesman [...]
Browser Detection In JavaScript Libraries
I was curious what browser detection in various JS libraries look like. While we always try to avoid doing browser detection, it’s sometimes a necessary evil. Here’s what I found.
