It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
I really enjoyed this chat between Bruce Lawson and Mustafa Kurtuldu where they talked about browser support and the health of the web. Bruce expands upon a lot of the thoughts in a post he wrote last year called World Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web where he writes:
… Read article...across the world, regardless of disposable income, regardless of hardware or network speed, people want to consume the same kinds of goods and services. And if your websites are made for
Part of Remy Sharp's argument that jQuery is still relevant is this incredible usage data:
I've been playing with BigQuery and querying HTTP Archive's dataset ... I've queried the HTTP Archive and included the top 20 [JavaScript libraries] ... jQuery accounts for a massive 83% of libraries found on the web sites.
This corroborates other research, like W3Techs:
… Read articlejQuery is used by 96.2% of all the websites whose JavaScript library we know. This is 73.1% of all websites.
The DOM and native browser API's have improved by leaps and bounds since jQuery's release all the way back in 2006. People have been writing "You Might Not Need jQuery" articles since 2013 (see this classic site and this classic repo). I don't want to rehash old territory, but a good bit has changed in browser land since the last You Might Not Need jQuery article you might have stumbled upon. Browsers continue to implement new APIs that take … Read article
Most WordPress themes show user Gravatars in the comment threads. It's a way of showing an image with the user, as associated by the email address used. It's a nice touch, and almost an expected design pattern these days.
Every one of those gravatars is an individual HTTP request though, like any other image. A comment thread with 50 comments means 50 HTTP requests, and they aren't always particularly tiny files. Yeesh.
Let's lazy load them.… Read article
One of the big reasons to use jQuery, for a long time, was how easy it made Ajax. It has a super clean, flexible, and cross-browser compatible API for all the Ajax methods. jQuery is still mega popular, but it's becoming more and more common to ditch it, especially as older browser share drops and new browsers have a lot of powerful stuff we used to learn on jQuery for. Even just querySelectorAll is often cited as a reason to … Read article
Many sites with lots of written content employ specially crafted print style sheets. That way, a user can print out the relevant content without wasting paper on navigation, ads, or anything else not germane.
Articulate.js, a jQuery plugin, is what I consider the narrative equivalent. With as little as one line of code, it enables developers to create links that allow users to click, sit back, and listen to the browser read aloud the important content of a web … Read article
It took a minute, but I believe we have arrived at Baby Bear on the jQuery conversation. Some choice quotes from the ensemble cast blog post:
Nathanael Anderson: The biggest negative for jQuery in this day and age is that browsers are a lot more standard in coverage and directly messing with the DOM is slow unless you can do everything at one time; and jQuery was not designed for large change groups.
… Read articleTodd Motto: Final thing from me: let’s
I posted about jQuery UI's position feature years ago, but I was just thinking of how useful the collision detection part of that feature is. In a nutshell: you can position an element where you want them to go, but if it calculates that where you're putting it would be offscreen or otherwise hidden, it will adjust the positioning to fix it. … Read article
I don't always write CoffeeScript, but when I do, I'm probably using jQuery too; I always forget the syntax for stuff. So I'm going to write it all down here so I can reference it until I memorize it.… Read article
Let's say there is a feature on your website that only gets used 5% of the time. That feature requires some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to work. So you decide that instead of having that HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the page directly, you're going to Ajax that stuff in when the feature is about to be used.
We'll need to make three Ajax requests. Since we don't want to show anything to the user until the feature is ready … Read article