Category Archives: JavaScript
Maiden Voyage of the DOM Sailbloat
As many of you may already know, my day job includes managing a large and complex enterprise jQuery-based user interface component library. It’s used by all new web applications at the company, which boasts over an IT department of approximately 1500 people and hundreds of web applications. Needless to say, I get a fair volume [...]
Also posted in DOM, Projects Tagged Firebug, Firebug Lite, log4javascript, YUI Logger
Point, Charset, Match: Character Encoding in JavaScript
If you’re not familiar with the principles of character encoding, read the prerequisite Dive Into HTML 5 section on the subject. When you see issues with Character Encoding, it’s traditionally in the form of text on your page that looks like this: in Firefox or in IE. Usually, those characters mean that the character encoding [...]
Also posted in Web Browsers Tagged Character Encoding, Closure Compiler
Internet Explorer Array.sort Unreliable
What would you expect to be the result of executing the following code? // Create a medium size array, at least 100 items var obj = []; for(var j=0, k=150; j<k; j++) { // the value here doesn't matter. obj.push('ABCD'+j); } // Sort the array alphabetically. obj.sort(function(m,p){ m=(''+m).toLowerCase(); p=(''+p).toLowerCase(); if(m > p) return [...]
Posted in JavaScript Tagged Internet Explorer, JScript
Trash that “Back to Top” Link
It would seem that perfection is attained not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed. - Antoine de Saint Exupéry While most would argue that the principles espoused in the above quote might also be applied to the quote itself, it would serve us better to consider how we [...]
Also posted in Interface Design Tagged Page Fold, Scrolling
Quick Performance Tip: jQuery and addClass
Abstractions are helpful and dangerous. But the more we know about a library’s internals, the less danger we’ll be in later. Here’s an issue I ran into where I had assumed that jQuery would be optimized for this case, but it wasn’t. I’ll go over my bad assumption and how to workaround it. As of [...]
Posted in JavaScript Tagged jQuery, Performance
Performance Caveat with jQuery Selectors and Live Events
Prerequisite: Knowledge/Experience with jQuery Live Events (new in jQuery 1.3), and the concept of Event Delegation. When developing on the front end, it’s easy to prioritize correctness over performance. Performance is the step child that gets lost while you’re pulling your hair out worrying about cross browser compatibility. It’s very important to regularly benchmark your [...]
Posted in JavaScript Tagged Event Delegation, jQuery
Scare Your Visitors with this JavaScript Gravatar Plugin
Here's a use case. An unregistered visitor visits your blog, and decides that your content is so good that it merits a comment! Congratulations, you've fooled them! But since they're leaving a comment, why not show them a preview of their gravatar?
Faking Onload for Link Elements