Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

As a frontend developer I’ve long argued the magic formula for a good website is:

Usefulness + Speed = Users

This is based on the fact that the best websites on the internet are pretty spartan in appearance. When you look at many of the successful ones (Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Facebook), they’ve all taken the approach [...]

It’s happening again. Once upon a time, browser vendors started adding their own features without consulting with each other and agreeing upon standards. What they created was a giant mess of inconsistencies across browsers and platforms that is still in effect today. Ask any web developer and they can tell you of [...]

As a heads up to developers, Cross Site XMLHttpRequest (XHR) has been removed from Firefox 3, despite being in earlier betas. To quote a draft relnote from Mike Beltzner:

Due to late changes in the Cross Site XMLHttpRequest specification which made our implementation incomplete, it was decided to remove support for this technology rather than [...]

There are still quite a few websites that use a Favicon on a white background. While this looked OK in older browsers, these day with browsers like Firefox 3.0, they don’t look so great. It’s about time to make them transparent. Here are a few examples:
Here’s a tab with a nice transparency:

buzilla.mozilla.org
Here’s [...]

So the format war of Blue-ray vs. HD-DVD is over. There are still several other rather significant battles going on in the tech world right now that aren’t Microsoft vs. Apple or Yahoo vs. Google. For example:
Adobe Air vs. Mozilla Prism vs. Microsoft Silverlight
Google Gears vs. HTML5 Offline support
Android vs. iPhone SDK vs. [...]

In the past day I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading on what others think of this meta stupidity. A few suggested remedies are particularly good and worth a post linking to. My two favorites both from Mozilla hackers are these:
David Baron has a must read blog post. Since the bulk [...]

As Robert O’Callahan, John Resig, Anne van Kesteren all point out, this idea of using a meta tag to select a rendering engine is bad. Here are my personal thoughts on the issue. Not as a browser developer but as a web developer.
Essentially the argument by the IE team is this: Rather than [...]

As everyone in the industry knows, Nielsen/NetRatings no longer relies on page views instead preferring total time spent. This makes sense since ajax applications can have 1 page view, but keep a user for an hour. Not to mention other things like video or Flash. The use of time spent is likely [...]

So I decided to do a little book shopping a few weeks ago and one thing I purchased was High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers (affiliate link). At its core is essentially a 14 step guide to making faster websites. I don’t think any of the steps are new or [...]

Snoopy is a PHP class that automates many common web browsing functions making it easier to fetch and navigate the web using PHP. It’s pretty handy. I found an interesting bug recently and diagnosed it this afternoon.
If you navigate to a 301 or 302 redirect in a subdirectory you can get [...]