The State of mobile Browsers- From PPK

PPK is the owner of the invaluable QuirksMode.org and has been digging into mobile browsers for the last few years – This research produces some quite disappointing results with layers of complexity in browsers that you would expect to have some consistency – “There is no webkit for mobile”

Anyway, he gave a talk recently and has published the slides at http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/03/gomez_webinar_s.html

Some of the data was eye opening for me.

Enjoy!

jQuery is for n00bs

I have had the conversation several times recently about jQuery, dojo, YUI etc.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the main differences are that things like dojo and YUI are frameworks (I differentiate by them having a packaging system) whereas jQuery, prototype etc. are libraries (Although jQ will roll the UI library).

This blog post summarizes it nicely. jQuery is for n00bs

I do love jQuery for quickly getting things done on a website and love to read their code and bugs to collect the oddities of various browsers, but for a packaged componentized system dojo wins for me.

Frame busting

Ajaxian posted this one and the attached document is worth a read. They have a good summary and if you read the document there is a recommended practice, but you should be aware of the shortcomings of other methods.

I’ll look, in the future, at how this affects the list of sites we are reviewing.

Download the article from Stanford Web Security

Adding <script> asynchronously

Steve Souders comes up with what should be the definitive way to add script into a web page. This is particularly relevant to widget and third party code develoers.

Steve Souders comes up with what should be the definitive way to add script into a web page. This is particularly relevant to widget and third party code developers.

Part of the acceptance criteria for third party code in an e-commerce environment is its lack of impact on performance and other code in the page

The article appendChild vs insertBefore I hope will be part of a set of best practice conclusions from his P3PC series.

To augment your reading of this article it is also worth reviewing the information on browser “busy” indicators that was contained in the lesson Load Scripts Without Blocking from his CS193H Stanford class.

Based on the above, I tend to use XHR injection for local scripts to avoid the Firefox busy indicator and script DOM element insertion for offsite 3rd party code.