StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

PO
text
Body
copied!<p>First off let me say I have worked on multiple initiatives where the teams have started down the path of dynamically generating the DOM via Javascript, including remote-loading of scripts through CORS.</p> <p>After many months of effort on 3 different projects (and different approaches used in each), we finally had to face the fact that IE7 and IE8 are incapable of properly or consistently dynamically loading and processing external scripts or CSS.</p> <p><strong>My recommendation is to consolidate / combine any scripts on the PHP / server side and serve up as a single file that can be cached on the client side.</strong> </p> <p>As an additional note, IE is not completely to blame. There are huge complexities involved with downloading, processing, and rendering scripts / css in the correct orders and programming this process such that it works well in every environment (webkit + mozilla + IE9+) requires near-expert-level knowledge and very thorough testing.</p> <p>In your case, one example of bad "flow" is the fact that when I viewed your page specifically, it briefly shows the non-CSS-applied page (yucky!) before the screen "updates" and CSS gets pulled in and applied. Bad bad bad. </p> <p>Other issues I noticed are the large number of httprequests in general. Each requires a DNS lookup, cache / expires check (and other stuff dictated by headers), and subsequent download of response. On desktops this is not all that noticable, but on mobile devices, tablets and even some slower / bogged-down PC's it is especially noticable. </p> <p>If you're building a web app in today's browsing environment and have only a small team, it's probably best to either:</p> <ol> <li>Serve up CSS as a single, cacheable file from a CDN, and pages in pre-parsed, pre-iterated, pre-rendered HTML chunks, minimizing the client-side JS processing (only binding elements post-load), or </li> <li>Go with a pre-existing client-side framework such as Sencha, SproutCore, YUI etc. - they have built out the framework for you and fixed all the bugs already.</li> </ol> <p>Two things have to happen before I change my view: IE8 has to disappear from general use (drops below 10%), and the "average" mobile device needs to have 2 physical processor cores. Right now only the expensive / high-end models have dual-core processors.</p> <p>Also of note, the fastest mobile processors even with JIT JS compilers are still 10x slower than a typical desktop in JS performance - which when compared directly to a desktop, would compete head-to-head with a Pentium 4 or old AMD Athlon 64. </p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload