Some good news from browser makers today to put a cap on a great year for browser development and innovation.
I’ve recently been developing a web-based application (a RIA one might say) and, after initially trying to get it working right in jQuery, I decided to have a go at using ExtJS, a JavaScript library I’ve been meaning to try for a while. Basically, it is a JavaScript library that includes a ton of things for building web application other libraries don’t - not surprising considering it started life as an add-on to YUI. Here is my initial impressions of it, most of which are direct comparisons to jQuery.
I have just finished upgrading this blog to Wordpress 2.3. As of now I have only completed the actual migration - I have yet to start taking advantage of any of the new features of version 2.3 (such as tags) so expect those to be slowly rolled out this week.
I have also started work on a completely revised theme for the site which I hope to get finished in the next week or so. I’m using The Morning After as a base and making some pretty heavy customisations as well as a bunch of cosmetic changes. The interesting thing is that many aspects of the theme are a step backwards for me in some ways, such as the CSS being far more complex than it needs to be and the semantics of the markup being all out of wack. Still, it’s a good base visually and structurally.
Stylesheets and script files can often get quite large. Although they will be cached by the browser there is still the time delay (and bandwidth hit) of the first loading, which according to Yahoo! is more often than you think. Here’s a quick and dirty method of using PHP with gzip compression to send your CSS, Javascript and whatever else compressed to browsers.