Train of Thoughts

Triggered by recent code size discussions in the jQuery community, I’ve thought a little bit more about the “all dancing all singing 20KB jQuery core limit” which is often stated. You have not heard about this until now? Well, for acceptable reasons jQuery core is meant to be not larger than 20KB and to still reach this goal people optimize the jQuery core code by single characters — even if it IMHO sometimes obscures the code to some extend.

First, the “packer” compressed jQuery SVN as of today is 20961 bytes which actually is 20.46KB. Well, I’m personally fine with this. But I’m personally also fine with a jQuery of 30KB or even 40KB in size — as long as great functionality and stability is provided. And I can image that most people also care more about other factors than about a few KB more or less.

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On the net one sometimes see web pages where hyperlinks to external URLs are visually marked with an additional icon placed at the end of the hyperlink. I found this always a neat effect and hence have created such a simple icon myself in a few colors and coded a very
small jQuery plugin jquery.extlink.js which allows me to automatically add such an icon to all web pages. Find this jQuery plugin in the File Repository area.

I don’t know why jQuery doesn’t already provide support in its selector syntax for the Perl-style operators “=~” and “!~“, but I really wanted this feature for regular expression based matching of DOM node attribute value matching:
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Recently I was forced to debug my jQuery hacks in Internet Explorer (IE). I got extremely tired of having to use the nasty JavaScript alert() function for debugging while in Firefox I can use the cool Firebug plugin and its console.log() function. I thought Firebug is a Firefox/Firebug specific solution only. [more...]

During my recent evaluation of JavaScript toolkits I came across jQuery. As mentioned in this other posting, I was really pleased by jQuery. Hence I’ve investigated further and immediately used jQuery to solve a few tasks. One of the results which came out of this jQuery hacking was a reusable scheduling plugin. [more...]