Archive for the 'javascript' Category

Decisions, decisions

Friday, October 27th, 2006

The final afternoon and I face the trickiest decision over which session to attend - all three tracks look useful. I wanted to go to Nate Aune’s multimedia and podcasting tutorial, but i’m fairly well up to speed on that already, but it was difficult to decide between the KSS/ Azax and the UI’s 2.0 tutorials. I plumped for KSS on the basis that I have no idea what it is..

using BackgroundImageCache to solve background image flicker in IE

Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

Fantastic - at last a solution to IE background image flicker that doesn’t involve applying background images to containing elements. I will be using this - I’ll be interested to know if I can use the IE CSS filter version without a performance hit, as that could just sit in my IE-only stylesheet.

Mobile web and AJAX

Sunday, September 24th, 2006

I tried out a friends pocket pc (or is it windows mobile now?) smartphone recently - a cool little device with a slide out QWERTY keyboard (I think it was a variation of this htc device). It also had wifi support so I thought I would try to blog from it. However, he hadn’t got opera installed and the wordpress gui completely failed to work in pocket internet explorer. I’m sure there is a solution to this, but I was disappointed that the wordpress online admin didn’t gracefully degrade.

This is something to consider when designing web apps - whilst AJAX could potentially be used to provide huge usability enhancements to people using mobile web devices with small screens - the majority of people are going to be using windows mobile with pocket internet explorer - your app should work with no javascript support at all. and then be progressively enhanced with AJAX as a seperate consideration.

JSON - JavaScript Object Notation

Monday, August 21st, 2006

Another abbreviation(?)/buzzword that i’ve been hearing for months but I have only just understood what it is. From All in the Head (Drew Mclellan’s blog):-

if you’re not familiar, JavaScript Object Notation is a method of describing data structures such as arrays and objects and their contents in plain text. On receiving a chunk of JSON you can eval() it to recreate the data structure within your script

Read more about JSON here