Web Dev Digest Episode 9
Intro 
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Welcome to the Web Dev Digest, your daily web development news roundup.
 This is episode number nine, for Monday, July ninth, 2007.
 I'm your host, Ara Pehlivanian.
 
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Hello and welcome the show.

Throttling your JavaScript
It goes without saying that computers are getting faster by the day. Browersers have also sped up. Now normally speed in computing is a good thing, but Nicolas C Zakas of the Yahoo! User Interface team argues that sometimes you need to slow your code down. Take for example the browser's onResize event. Most browsers only trigger it once the user has completed resizing the browser window. Internet Explorer on the other hand, calls it repeatedly while user is dragging the mouse. You can see how this can become a big performance problem if the function you assign to the onResize event does anything near complex work. Zakas explains how to overcome this problem in a post to the YUI blog today. He discusses a concept known as throttling, whereby an event call is deferred or delayed. Using this technique for example, you can tell IE to only execute your resize code once every second, or a couple of times a second, as opposed to repeatedly as the browser window is being resized.

W3C in Montreal
The World Wide Web Consortium has announced its participation as a cosponsor of the Extreme Markup Languages event to be held from the 7th to the 10th of August in Montreal, Quebec. According to the conference site, quote, Extreme is an open marketplace of theories about markup and all the things that they support or that support them: the difficult cases in publishing, linguistics, transformation, searching, indexing, and storage and retrieval. At Extreme, markup enthusiasts gather each year to trade in ideas, not to convince management to buy new stuff. At Extreme we push the edges of markup theory & practice. end quote

Speeding up your pages
Christian Heilmann has posted an article discussing web page optimization techniques that promise to give the appearance of faster load times by offsetting the download of heavy and superfluous content till after the main content in the page has loaded. For example, you can load a basic CSS file with background colors for use in your layout, and then using JavaScript, load another one with background images only /after/ the main document has loaded.

CSS3 Today
Peter Gasston asks, "what CSS 3 can you easily use right now?" then proceeds to answer, "none of it." In an article posted on CSS dot info today, Gasston details the paltry, dare I say laughable implementations that browser makers have eeked out over the past *seven* years. Since Howcome Lie's 1999 prediction of CSS3's imminent arrival, we've gotten attribute selectors and opacity support. And even that's hampered by IE6's tenacious grip on about fifty percent of the browser market. So what to do about it? Gasston suggests grassroots action.


Outtro 
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 You've been listening to the Web Dev Digest, your daily web development news roundup.
 This was episode number nine, for Monday, July ninth, 2007. I'm Ara Pehlivanian.
 Show notes with links to the news covered in this episode can be found on web dev digest dot net.