Somewhere near the end of February I started working on my site again as a sort of therapy to get over my burn-out. I focused on the compatibility tables, which were in desperate need of an update; I hadn't published any major new versions since 2005. Besides, new browser versions are proliferating all over the place and people need to know what these browsers can and can’t do.

Today I can finally unveil my most ambitious update: the Events compatibility tables. All in all I think I spent two weeks’ of work on them; testing all common events not only in common situations, but also in unusual ones. A quick test of basic browser support for W3C and Microsoft events completed this series of tests.

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Nowadays many JavaScripters are aware of the advantages of event delegation. Chris Heilmann and Dan Webb, among others, have discussed its advantages, and I've been using it as much as possible for about two years now.

Event delegation is especially useful in effects like dropdown menus, where lots of events on links may take place that can easily be handled at the root level (an <ol> or <ul> in this case).

There used to be one problem, though: although event delegation works fine for the mouse events, it does not work for the focus and blur events we need to make dropdown menus keyboard-accessible.

In the course of my ongoing event research, however, I found a way to delegate the focus and blur events, too. Maybe one of those frightfully clever JavaScript library authors will use this technique to shave off a few milliseconds of computing time

For all I know they're already aware of this technique; but it was new to me so I publish it anyway.

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Yesterday I gave my first ever conference presentation in Dutch at the Pfcongrez, the annual conference of the PHP Freakz, the largest Dutch organisation for PHP programmers.

The presentation went well; I talked about the principles of unobtrusive JavaScript and it turned out that this concept was new to many attendees. I hope to have made a difference somewhere.

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Currently I'm working on a big revision of the Events Compatibility Tables. And no the new table is not yet online because I'm not ready yet.

Testing event support is really awesomely complicated. I've been working steadily for two weeks now, and I still find new bugs and oddities daily, and twice on Sundays.

In any case, I discovered something remarkable when I studied the mousemove event. It sheds light on the way browser vendors keep track of each other's implementations nowadays, and on things that can go wrong.

Update: The bug described in this entry is an OS problem, and not a browser bug.

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Just now I re-tested the CSS Object Model, both to accomodate IE8b1, FF3b4 and Safari 3.1, and because some of my earlier conclusions were wrong.

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In the past few days I've worked a bit on my compatibility tables. IE8b1 information has been added to the W3C DOM Core and HTML tables.

Furthermore I've taken the opportunity to present the CSS compatibility table better. I split the page into two tables, CSS 2.1 and CSS 3, and I added a few CSS tests. The table below shows the new tests and their browser compatibility.

Update: Added Safari 3.1 Windows information to the main CSS table only.

Finally, a question. Who knows of CSS 3 declarations that don't yet figure in the CSS table but are supported by at least one browser? (Nightlies don't count, but betas do.) Please leave a comment with declaration name and supporting browser. It'll help me get my testing priorities straight.

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As everybody and his dog know by now, Microsoft has made IE8 beta 1 available. First impression: decent progress, but a lot of work remains to be done. And, in all fairness, this is merely a first beta, and its main purpose is to show where Microsoft is headed, and not to get every little thing right on the first try.

There's a lot to be said about its CSS and JavaScript support, and I'm going to say it all. My readers, as well as the IE team, expect that.

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