Huge CSS files can gunk up your page loads, creating annoying wait times for your readers and (if things get really bad) even driving people away before the page fully loads.
The trick to avoiding breaking your user experience is to make your CSS as lean, clean and fast as possible. There are tried and true techniques for speeding things up, like using Gzip, or serving one or two files instead of dozens. There are also poor optimization methods you should avoid.
Today, we bring you an informative video from the recent 2010 O’Reilly Velocity conference on how to optimize CSS while avoiding some of the most common mistakes developers make. It’s especially useful for those of you with big CSS payloads. The first speaker is a little dry, but the fun picks up when Nicole Sullivan takes over about five minutes in.
Making websites accessible to users with disabilities — things like poor vision, blindness, limited dexterity — has been central to the mission of the web’s overseers since the dawn of the browser.
There are a few browser extensions out there to help the disabled surf the web comfortably. Google has posted this video to show us what the company is doing to improve the accessibility of its browser, Chrome. The video highlights a few of the extensions that have already been built for this purpose, like Chrome Vis and Keyboard Navigation.
There’s also some advice for extensions builders interested in accessibility, like remembering to include text color, text size and keyboard shortcuts options in your extensions. More here.
Nothing fishy about IE9's hardware acceleration: This demo shows an animated fish tank rendered using Canvas.
Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9 platform preview 3, the latest pre-release version of the company’s next web browser.
Curious developers running Windows can download platform preview 3 starting Wednesday afternoon. This version of IE9 features expanded support for specific HTML5 elements that can take advantage of the browser’s new hardware-acceleration abilities.
“Most computing tasks on the web only take up 10 percent of the PC’s capabilities,” Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin said at a press event Wednesday. “We want to unlock that other 90 percent.”
The new IE9 platform preview has expanded support for HTML5′s native video and audio capabilities, as well as expanded support for the Canvas element.
“Showing how well we handle these HTML5 elements is the point of this release,” says Microsoft’s Rob Mauceri.
Microsoft has taken a fair bit of heat in the browser world for being slow to adopt HTML5. Though not yet finalized, the emerging specification is already widely supported by Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Microsoft’s current version of Internet Explorer, IE8, is woefully behind these other browsers when it comes to support for HTML5 and other standards like CSS 3.
With IE9, due around the end of the year, the company hopes to get back on the right path.
Microsoft has engineered this version of the browser to take advantage of the latest multicore processors and GPU chips shipping in the newest hardware. Several of Microsoft’s hardware partners — AMD, Asus, NVidia and Dell — were on hand with their newest, fastest machines at the press event to show the browser preview running through some Microsoft-built demos.
The company first showed off a hardware-accelerated preview of IE9 at a developer event last year, and then upped those capabilities with the second platform preview in May. But Wednesday’s release of IE9 has some updated code to access the hardware and an updated JavaScript engine to make scripted animations smoother. Continue Reading “New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives” »
YouTube has launched a new video-editing tool that lets you edit your uploaded videos inside your web browser.
The new video editor will definitely not replace desktop software like iMovie or Windows Live Movie Maker anytime soon. That said, YouTube’s editor does cover the basics like combining uploaded clips, trimming, editing and adding audio to your uploaded videos.
This isn’t the first time YouTube has experimented with in-browser editing. You may remember YouTube’s Remixer tool, which was released in 2007 as an experiment, had limited capability and was buggy to boot. It was based on Flash and other Adobe technologies.
The new editor is definitely a big step up, and it’s powered mostly by JavaScript. The interface is simple and quite easy to use. To start editing, just drag the thumbnails of your uploaded videos into the filmstrip at the bottom. Once you have your clips in the editor, you’ll notice the cursor turns to scissors. Click one of the thumbnails, and you can start trimming and editing your footage.
There’s also an option to add music to your clips, though the selection is limited and, as Google Operating System notes, some tracks will cause YouTube to display ads in your final video.
Once you’ve got your clips edited and arranged the way you want, you can watch a low-res preview and then save your changes back to your videos. The interface is quite snappy when it comes to editing, and even saving, though it takes some time for YouTube to actually process your video and make it available on the site.
While YouTube’s new editor is clearly a limited, work-in-progress effort, it’s not hard to see how Google can build on this foundation to create something that will serve the needs of most casual video editors, eliminating the need for yet another piece of desktop software.
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Works in all modern browsers. The demo lets you choose between an iPod ad and “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. You know what to do.
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