September 11, 2006

JavaScript Performance in Trident (IE)

From the MSDN IE Blog... Most of these are common sense, but it's sometimes good to have a little reminder.

IEBlog: JavaScript Performance Recommendations - Part 1

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

October 28, 2005

Clarity

Just being reading an interesting article on Zombie Copy over at A List Apart. It actually has some very valid points — in an effort to make copy sound good & to make use of that thesaurus, clarity often seems to get lost in a jumble of euphemisms, superlatives and acronyms.

I for one am guilty of this too, the current copy on the my business site contains well... dear I say it, a lot of fluff—written 2-3 years ago when I didn't know better :( Fortunately that site is in the process of a major overhaul, copy included.

The value of clearly saying what you mean can't be underestimated, though it appears it's often forgotten!

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

October 25, 2005

Like An Elephant In Your Backyard

There really is a lot of rublish information out there on the Internet, presented by so called "experts". While researching javascript performance tuning for a current project, I came across these charming nuggets:

Iterating loops backwards (decrementing) is faster than incrementing, and when looping though DOM objects by tagname, it's faster to include the getElementsByTagName is the for loop evaluation statement. I wonder how many people blindly accept this stuff?

Profiling the above coding suggestions in gecko (Firefox) and trident (Internet Explorer 6), showed that in all cases the suggestions resulted in speeds that were either the same or slower. In fact, the getElementsByTagName suggestion under Internet Explorer 6 increased the execution time by 250%, not exactly a performance increase! lol.

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 0 Fraggles

March 24, 2005

Ghostbusters, Inspector Gadget & Firefox

I recently started using the Venkman JavaScript Debugger for Firefox (and other Mozilla based browsers), named after Peter Venkman from the 1984 movie Ghostbusters.

Well having used javascript alert boxes and such like for debugging for years, I have to say this thing is absolutely brilliant.

Especially the ability to watch variable values change as the code executes. Extremely useful for tracking down those niggling coding logic errors—the ones that execute fine but just don't work!

Also of invaluable help is Firefox's DOM Inspector. I had looked at this when I first installed Firefox, but didn't realise it would update the tree to reflect changes made with DHTML—oops! The current project I'm working on creates large amounts of elements dynamically, so this is great for tracking down dodgy object creation/nesting.

However it doesn't help when the problem is actually a bug in Firefox itself (1.0.1), arrrgggh. In this case moving a DIV to be the first child node, made the second child [it's sibling, also a DIV] lose its margins. The problem doesn't occur in the latest Firefox nightly or Internet Explorer, frustrating...

Debugging In Internet Explorer

Having tried the Microsoft Script Debugger and found it to be a flying piece of sh*t, I discovered the link below describing the MS Script Editor; a very capable javascript debugger for Internet Explorer. Very useful when you're debugging a msie specific code fork, especially since IE's default error messages are most completely useless...

Javascript Debugging using the MS Script Editor

Great hall locations: Web Development  |  Talked about by: 1 Fraggles