Google Chrome and History Management

A possible bug in Google Chrome. If it is indeed a bug, the Chrome team should react to it instead of classifying it Won't fix. But I still have to study it myself; maybe it's more complicated.

Chrome | Permalink

MAMA: Markup validation report

Opera has done something cool again: it has unveiled a search engine called MAMA.

Opera Mama. I must admit that the first association going through my head was one of overweight Italian sopranos singing arias while cooking pasta for their large brood of children, but that does not seem to be what the project is about.

The Opera Mama search engine doesn't search for content, but for structure. In other words, it answers questions like how many websites use headers at all, and of those, how many use them correctly?

Now that's pretty interesting by itself.

Even better is the excellent series of articles that describes what Opera Mama does, why it does exactly what it does, and not something else, and a literature list with previous attempts to study web site structures. This is what a good article series should look like. If we'd all follow Opera's example, writing about web development would become ever so slightly more scientific.

Reference, Tests | Permalink

Understanding eval scope

Rakesh Pai researches eval() and reports some truly curious findings; for instance a difference between plain eval() and window.eval() when they're used in an object method.

Required reading for anyone interested in JavaScript Core.

Core | Permalink

Zoom

Dave Shea said what I've been thinking for months: with all browsers (except Chrome) supporting page zoom, there's no more need for CSS techniques revolving around text resizing. Specifically, we can once again use px for font definitions and widths.

Dave poses it as a question, but to me there's really no debate: the endless checking of your page in various font sizes, and mending anything that may break, is not necessary any more.

CSS | Permalink

JavaScript and screen readers

A JavaScript Events compatibility table for Jaws 9.0 and Windows Eyes 7.0b1. Always useful (and yes, they got my permission to use my compatibility categories and formatting).

Screen readers | Permalink

Introducing onFocus and onBlur

The YUI team has taken my research into delegating the focus and blur events and included it in the brand new YUI 2.6.0

Use of the technique turned out to matter especially for creating and removing modal dialogs. When creating such a dialog, all focus events elsewhere on the page have to be redirected to it; after all the point of a modal dialog is that it cannot lose the focus except when you click on the Close button.

Until now YUI set a focus event on every single element on the page, an action that's costly in terms of performance. However, now they can just set one generic event at (presumably) document level, and that brings modal dialog creation time back by about 50%, and cleanup time by about 98%.

Now THAT's what I call performance gains. Cool work.

Events | Permalink

Hammerhead: moving performance testing upstream

Steve Souders also released Hammerhead, a Firebug extension meant for measuring page load times.

Tools | Permalink

UA Profiler

Steve Souders has unveiled a new test suite for browser performance charcteristics. Please take all your browsers, especially obscure ones, and run the automatic tests in them. You'll help web developers around the world.

Benchmarks | Permalink