Viewing profile — mkmcdonald

Browser elitism benefits no one. The user is left insulted, and the developer strokes their own ego.

> [...] the onus is on us as web developers to encourage [him/her] (in positive ways) to upgrade - through better web applications that require new features, better communicating t…

You've been misled into thinking that you need features X, Y and Z. Web pages can be functional without flashy new features. Your browser is your choice, and we as developers need …

UserAgent sniffing and Graceful Degradation do not mesh. This sniffing in particular will fail for Opera 6-8, therefore excluding perfectly capable browsers by a very shallow crite…

Oddly enough, I was working on a similar problem earlier today. I've found that collecting the Text nodes and returning them in an Array is preferable. All it requires is some simp…

> I find that naming things descriptively and an 80 character limit are at odds. I don't. I use descriptive names for functions and short, concise words for variables (sometimes cl…

I'm pleased that someone else favours a sensible line limit. I stick to 72 columns for width and 20 lines per function body. The result has been very concise code that's easy to fo…

I much prefer "responsive" Web pages to "mobile" sites. Many "mobile" sites cram way too many flashy graphics and bloated scripts into the client; compound that with features that …

> Web technology is great for many things. Replicating a native app experience is not one of them. Yep. The client-side environment is far too unstable to build a "native app". The…

> If there is something out there that is better by a wide enough margin to justify giving up that established ecosystem, I'd love to hear about it. The ecosystem has plenty of imp…

You do realize that IE 10 dropped conditional comments, right?

I'll play the cynic here and try to diagnose why this is even being considered. jQuery is a very invasive API. Its goal is to steal all the work from the developer, and to "guarant…

The browser versions here are never mentioned, which means this is "multi-browser", and not "cross-browser" (a large difference). Furthermore, the following snippets are simply fal…

Viewed in IE 4 (800px x 600px): http://i.imgur.com/9NZgc.png

Please feel free to comment on the project or the Web site. I'll try to field every response.

I guess my humble iPod Touch that sputters out on bloated sites like GitHub just isn't up to snuff. Try loading a page without script bloat and you'll see a noticeable difference.

…which is a façade for the existing CSS engine. Developers clamoured for it (right or wrong), and it was implemented.

A massive script such as jQuery does not belong on a mobile device, minified or not. Surely mobile developers would know that minimal script is best.

The DOM API is clear enough that silly abstractions like "selector engines" are unnecessary. The C vs. Assembly argument is such a silly non-point; apples and artichokes.

What the jQuery team either perceives or peddles as "modules" are simply split files; there's no encapsulation. All that's new is a shiny node.js builder. I am interested, though, …

> I have made every browser crash and become completely non-responsive, many times over. Chrome. Firefox. Opera. All of them. Now, this is mostly through JavaScript, when I do some…

> Is [JavaScript] really an issue in 2012? I mean, people can hardly use Twitter.com itself without JS turned on. That's an indictment on Twitter's shoddy front-end code. The clean…

> Unless your customers are paranoid computer geeks, you should completely ignore users who disable JavaScript. Hypothetical: CDN X is having problems, and your scripts don't load.…

Of course, the problem with jQuery is that you're required to use an all-or-none approach. Feel free to send me an e-mail (check my profile) if you have DOM questions.