Session tokens, cookies, and local storage

Link-post today, the Meteor blog has a very interesting post about why Meteor has so-far avoided session cookies in favor of localStorage, including a high-level but nevertheless useful overview of issues with session cookies. Useful read for the security-minded, including an interesting suggestion near the end of a "both and" approach.

Opera switching to WebKit+V8

Opera has decided to switch to using WebKit and V8 for for all new products. First they'll start with a product for smartphones (since as they say, many mobile-facing sites are only/best tested on WebKit anyway), and then Opera Desktop and other products will follow.

By my count, that leaves us with three major rendering engines (WebKit, Gecko, and Trident), and three major JavaScript engines (V8, SpiderMonkey, and JScript). Well, you could perhaps argue that there are two JScripts (the really broken one in IE8 and earlier, and the much better and completely rewritten one in IE9 and later), but let's not quibble.

Amazon S3 Adds Root Domain Support

More interesting news from Amazon: Now S3 supports static website hosting on the root of your domain. So in addition to http://www.example.com you can now have http://example.com. This comes warm on the heels of their having added CORS support in August and redirections in October. The directon is fairly clear, eh?

Incredible. Extraordinary. Inspiring. Beautiful.

Ten years of Hubble photographs of a tiny portion of the night sky, well away from the glare of the Milky Way, deep into the infrared and then corrected back to visible, the eXtreme Deep Field is nothing less than a breathtaking view deep into the Universe. Just...impossibly incredible.

S3 Adds CORS Support

Some interesting news today: Amazon's S3 now supports CORS, the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing standard. This means that in addition to storing your images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files in S3 as you might be now, you can now also store any static data or templates you want to retrieve via ajax there, assuming your user is using a browser that supports CORS (all modern ones do, one way or another). This isn't a game-changer, there were ways to do this anyway (basically embedding those resources in JavaScript files a'la JSONP), but it just got a bit easier...

A reminder how Microsoft used to drive web innovation

As IE6 finally rides into the sunset,* Nicholas C. Zakas offers us a reminder of how, in a series of browser releases culminating in IE6, Microsoft introduced many of the key web innovations we use today such as innerHTML, access to all elements (not just forms and such), Ajax, modern events, and several others. This isn't in any way to discount what Netscape and others have done, but it's worth remembering that the browser everyone loves to hate was easily the best browser available when it came out. (Opera made a run at it soon thereafter, but never quite managed to take the lead, mostly because it didn't support legacy non-standard sites well. And then of course, along came Firefox, and then Chrome.) Good read, thanks Nicholas!

(* Unless — huge caveat — you're creating sites for China [21.3% market share], or arguably for Japan [4.7%] or India [3%].)

jQuery - Element cleanup update

For those who saw my jQuery - Cleaning up when elements go away post yesterday, I've updated it showing how we can do this right now, today, without waiting for the enhancement (or if the enhancement is never accepted). Oh, and the enhancement went from six lines to three. Many thanks to Dave Methvin for showing how (in both cases). Enjoy!

Steve Sanderson's Round-Up of Eight Rich JS Libs/Frameworks

Steve Sanderson's done an interesting round up of the eight libraries and frameworks represented at the Throne of JS conference recently. The conference was about JavaScript applications, not web pages, and focuses on the kinds of projects that help you do your Model-View-Whatever stuff. Worth reading, bookmarking, and re-reading later. Steve declares his interest — he's on the KnockoutJS core team — but keeps it neutral, partially by staying very high-level. Which is exactly what I want from this kind of round-up.

Too Funny - An IE7 Tax

An Australian online retailer has started charging users of IE7 a tax to use the browser on their website. This was inspired, they say, by the amount of time it took their developers to make the site work correctly with IE7 (which 3% of their users were still using). The tax is currently 6.8% — 0.1% per month since IE7 was released.

Presumably they just aren't supporting IE6 at all — if they did, the tax would be a whopping 13% (at the moment).

John Cleese on Creativity

My good friend Jock Murphy blogged about this video, where John Cleese spends 36 minutes talking about creativity and telling "how many (blank)s does it take to change a light bulb" jokes. I can only echo Jock's sentiments here:

Go watch it. Go watch it now. Utterly brilliant.

Ever wondered what browsers support <insert feature here>?

There's a site for that: caniuse.com.

So, for instance, what browsers support the File API? These ones: http://caniuse.com/#search=file api.

Brilliant - A periodic table of elements

Josh Duck has done a Periodic Table of the Elements for HTML5. Brilliant (and pretty). In the 20 or so years of HTML, surely someone has thought of this concept before — but if so, I'm certainly not aware of it. Props to Josh!

What every programmer should know about sysadmin

Link-post today: Do you write software that someone is going to have to deploy to servers and administer? Then read this question on ServerFault and its answers, most especially this answer. Then read them again.

'Nuff said.

Minimizing Download Times

Hello all,

That's right, first post since...wow, since April. And it's not even a post, it's sort of a link-post.

I've been doing some work helping build the Prototype user community (moderating the user discussion group, creating an unofficial wiki, that kind of thing) and as part of that I've been doing little mini-articles, much like the ones I expected to do here.

So if you're writing web applications or web pages and you're interested in minimizing the download times for your scripts, check out this article I posted over there: Tip - Minimizing Download Times