Showing all entries from: February 2009
browsers, standards
If you don’t know what the getBoundingClientRect method is, you can read about it at the Mozilla Developer Center site or at the Microsoft Developer Network site — or better yet, read what John Resig has to say about it.
WebKit was the last remaining major browser engine that lacked support for getBoundingClientRect (and for the related getClientRects method) — until yesterday, when Sam Weinig landed support for it in WebKit too.
In my book at least, adding another useful supported-across-all-major-browsers feature to the open Web platform is a pretty cool thing. And as far as why this feature in particular is a worthwhile addition, well, you might want to go back on read John Resig’s write-up about it; title: getBoundingClientRect is Awesome.
2009-02-12 ·
browsers, standards, html5
The Database panel in WebKit’s Web Inspector now allows you to examine HTML5 per-origin client-side persistent data (name-value pairs) associated with a particular Web application — both localStorage data and sessionStorage data. That’s in addition to the ability it already had for allowing you examine per-origin/application client-side SQL data.
If you want to play around with it, feel free to play around with this: simple localStorage demo app. That demo app is a copy of one that Hixie set up at the WHATWG site — with one modification: I added a Delete button so that you can remove items (name-value pairs) and see the results reflected in Web Inspector.
It seems we have Nokia’s Yael Aharon to thank for submitting the patch that added this capability. I’d also guess that, as Yael suggested in the the WebKit bug report associated with the change, the Databases panel will eventually simply renamed Storage.
I’d also guess that capabilities will eventually be added for changing the name-value data directly from within Web Inspector (instead of being limited to only examining the data) — similar to the way that Web Inspector and similar developer tools in other browsers already allow you to change CSS properties and contents of the DOM.
Anyway, here’s hoping that developer tools in other browsers will at least also add the same kind of capabilities that Web Inspector now has for examining client-side persistent data.
2009-02-09 ·
browsers, standards, events
At the moment, I’m participating in a State of the Web 2009 panel discussion at Web Directions North. Lars Erik Bolstad from Opera is on the same panel and has just announced that Opera has developed a new ECMAScript/JavaScript engine named Carakan that uses a register-based bytecode instruction set and that’s 2.5 times faster on SunSpider than the previous JS engine in Opera, named Futhark.
And by providing an experimental implementation of a mechanism that eliminates the need for a bytecode-interpreter step — by compiling directly into native code — it has the potential to provide even more dramatic speed improvements. On the order of 5 to 50 times faster.
2009-02-05 ·
comments off
events
I’m at the Web Directions North event in Denver this week. I did a presentation at the “Ed Directions” pre-event yesterday and afterwards had a great dinner discussion with many of the folks involved in that.
Earlier today, John Allsopp asked me if I’d take part in the panel for the State of the Web 2009 discussion in the afternoon, along with Chris Wilson, Dan Connolly, Lars Erik Bolstad from Opera, Scott Fegette from Adobe, and John himself. So, very much looking forward to that.
I knew Manu Sporny and Christian Heilman would be here, and was glad to have a chance to finally meet them and talk with them during a break this morning. Among the other folks I’m looking forward to meeting here are Brad Neuberg and Dion Almaer. And have not seen my friend Ryan Sarver here yet, but I know he’s going to be here, so will be great to see him.
Tomorrow morning I’ll be doing my Web standards and the browser landscape: The year in review, the year ahead presentation. I guess I should probably get around to finishing up the slides for that…
2009-02-05 ·
