A notch above a monkey

iPod talk this Wednesday

I’ll be giving a talk this Wednesday at 19:00 in Kiberpipa as promised some time ago. The theme of the talk will be lessons learned from iPod about (web) design and everyone is welcome to attend.

I’m buying a drink for everyone, who’ll manage to stay through my rather short talk and won’t flee the scene immediately afterwards. The talk will probably be given in English.

Firefox and defer="defer"

If you’re sitting in the wrong part of the world, then Google might be inaccessible to you right now. That would be only a minor annoyance, if the same wasn’t true also for Google Analytics.

It’s remarkable how many sites (including this one) use it and are right now more or less inaccessible to every poor soul suffering from Google blackout. That’s because browser can’t tell if external Javascript will use a method like document.write and therefore blocks rendering until the code is loaded or it timeouts waiting for it.

There should be a workaround for times like this and according to HTML4 specification there is one . By using defer=”defer” we can signal to the browser that it can safely proceed rendering the page, because we won’t be using any dangerous methods in our Javascript files.

However, it sadly doesn’t work everywhere. It works in Internet Explorer, but fails in Firefox and Safari. And that simply sucks.

/code

I find searching through blogs for pieces of usable code rather unfriendly and I think I’m not the only one. That’s why I added a new section to my homepage, where I’ll publish useful or semi-useful pieces of code.