The library itself clocks in at 84 kB minified and ticks most of my boxes for a worthwhile JavaScript library (see Chapter 2 of my book to read more about my criteria). I commend this action and recommend this library – its support by the BBC means the community is in good hands.

Support for this tag is not available in all browsers, but it’s getting there with each new browser release. In theory, native video playback results in better CPU performance versus the use of a plug-in, which is a nice addition to the usual standards argument.

Check the demo site out for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/html5

You’ll need a fairly modern browser: Safari 3.1+, Opera 9.52+ or Firefox 3.5+ to view the site correctly. Sorry, IE fans – write to Microsoft about it! Google Chrome users may have to wait until version 3 for support!

The topic is building web applications, or RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) using JavaScript. The book is split into three parts:

1. Best Practices: I reveal how to build upon a solid, maintainable foundation of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to avoid the need for unnecessary complication or development time
2. Performance: I show you to avoid the pitfalls of building a poorly responsive web application and teach the secrets for keeping it snappy.
3. Presentation: Web applications that work well are tailored towards the needs of end users. In this section, I explain how to use JavaScript to add a superior user experience to your RIAs.

And the title of the book….?

Pro JavaScript RIA Techniques: Best Practices, Performance, and Presentation.

I’ve created a section of my new site dedicated to the book, explaining what is covered in each chapter, and allowing you to download the source code for the examples within. To discover this and how to buy the book, visit my new site: http://www.denodell.com/

It’s like the plug-in captures the event, bringing up its own context menu, but doesn’t pass the event onto JavaScript / the page to handle.

Actions speak louder than words so here’s a demo: http://web.me.com/denodell/safari-plugin-bug/

Before it gets mentioned, yeah we’ve raised it as a bug against WebKit so hopefully it can be fixed before Safari 4.0 is released: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23759

If you have any solutions, please add them in the comments. We’ve tried everything, including shoving everything in <iframe>s, etc…

Both Microsoft and Nokia have lent support to John Resig’s open source JavaScript library, jQuery. MS will be writing their ASP.NET AJAX controls using the library (which is great, as I’ve had many problems trying to debug clashes between their JS code and mine in the past), and Nokia will be writing a bunch of their apps within the browser on their mobile phones (WebKit rendering engine), including Nokia Maps, which I’ve had the fortune of working on a particular version of recently.

For a while now, IBM and AOL have lent support to Dojo, which is a rather different beast to jQuery, in my opinion.

With the big players getting involved and adding back to these projects, credence to the ideal of cross-browser JavaScript and JS components that ‘just work’ is becoming ever greater.

jQuery is a great library, in my opinion, and the team that work on it are trying to push the browser for all it’s worth. On behalf of all the Web application developers out there, we salute you for your efforts, Resig & co.

First, WebKit announced SquirrelFish, their super-fast JS engine that kicked the pants of anything in the current browsers (as far as I am aware, this still hasn’t reached Safari). Then Mozilla fought back with TraceMonkey, using ever more complex programming and efficiency techniques to improve JS runtime performance, which will be in Firefox 3.1 but switched off by default as it’s still being tested. Then, to much fanfare, Google released their Chrome browser with the V8 JavaScript engine which they claimed was the fastest out there (I beg to differ when it comes to DOM interaction, but certainly for hardcore code, it rocked).

Now, the WebKit team has announce SquirrelFish Extreme, which initial benchmarks show runs 36% faster than V8 and 55% faster than TraceMonkey (http://summerofjsc.blogspot.com/2008/09/squirrelfish-extreme-has-landed.html ).

The future certainly looks bright (and speedy) for those of us building Web applications. Very exciting.

Limitations include: slow as hell on IE, and slow as hell when replacing more than about 5 headings (as with sIFR). Nice experiment though.

So now WebKit has V8 AND SquirrelFish JavaScript engines, both super fast, available for browser developers to harness out the box with WebKit. I only hope we see Mozilla pooling their skills and flipping to use WebKit some time in the future for Firefox. They can still build the browser around the engine any way they like, it almost seems unnecessary to have two open source browser engines now. Controversial!

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/09/08/chrome-features-are-coming-to-webkit/

The updated VPC images from MS are available for download now, and they include:

• XP SP3 + IE6
• XP SP2 + IE7
• XP SP3 + IE8b2
• Vista + IE7

They expire in January, at which time MS will update them.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

Now if Google can just persuade corporate environments to drop IE6 as their main browser, it will be an even better day.