Recently I was tasked with doing a heap of load testing, and we had all sorts of problems - all related, really, to confounding. I didn’t (and don’t) feel I know enough to design a load test, and the tools we were using were, well, limited. It’s interesting to note that I came to the same conclusion - that the data throughput was the most important metric.

However, the reason all these things talk about the number of users isn’t because programmers want it - rather, management and customers want to know how many users will it support. Telling them that you got an average data throughput of whatever is a better measure, but it doesn’t really mean anything to them - whereas could support 25 concurrent users does.

Good browsers (Mozilla, Opera and the like) allow you do define a style for hovering over, well, nearly any item. Naturally, Internet Explorer only supports a:hover - that is, hover for anchor tags. This sucks, and Peterned has written an HTC file that will, if the client is IE, rewrite the styles dynamically and assign the appropriate functionality to them.

Pretty cool.

Also, I found a bug in the way their Drag and Drop functionality works. If you click a node in the DOM beneath the node that is draggable, you get a Javascript error. I emailed them with a fix for that.

My only complaint about this Library - I’d prefer to have it as a selection of different Libraries. It seems a shame to have to lump them all together for some small bits of user interface. For example, I’d be willing to have Drag and Drop that doesn’t neatly ’slide’ back to it’s original position if not dropped on a Drop Zone. Having that in the UI means including LOTS of extra code. I pulled the Drag and Drop code out into a seperate file - I’ll publish it and the fix at some point soon.

A box with a border! Of course, this only works in Mozilla

Another box with a border!

An interesting validation technique

Encryption in Javascript. I’m sure I’ll think of a use eventually, but it just seems a neat idea to link with Ajax philosophy. I mean, with AES and the like, you can get the user to enter password, and there are uses for symmetric key algorithms.

(Update - having migrated my blog to Wordpress, I find that it uses this technique. And it’s quite nice. It works well)

I’ve already done this for combo boxes - I’ll put it on my site soon - and so I started looking into menus, and found some neat things:

• Almost entirely CSS menus
• Windows ‘Start menu’ like lists, similar to above but with more javascript (would need to work out the image reloading issue this seems to have though!)
• More CSS dropdowns
• Suckerfish Drop-downs

I didn’t know you could do so much with CSS. Clearly, it has come along since I last really got stuck into it!

Oh, and it neatly describes a problem I found (and had to solve) yesterday with the ‘this’ keyword in event handlers in Internet Explorer. Wish I’d known this before.

Anyway, I like this site, and it is useful.

Vertical Text

CSS seems to lack an real control over text direction - it should, but of course the reality is different.

What I found was a way of making vertical in IE using some of those pointless filters, and the support IE has for top to bottom, right to left languages. It’s a bit sneaky in doing this - but it works in IE, at least. I haven’t found a way of doing it in Mozilla.
<div style="{ writing-mode:tb-rl;
filter: flipv fliph;
white-space: nowrap;}">

- Aircraft Graveyard - Bet the North Koreans Like that!

- Hello Dave

- Hi Luecke

Interesting Maps… …lots more interesting pictures. Cool, but also kinda scary.

- PNG opacity (with some nice examples)

- Fuzzy Drop shadows (like on Google Maps)

- Transparency with HTC files

- And again

- Choosing what image to serve in PHP on the server

Related: Opacity in CSS, being able to see through DIVS - CSS Transparency for IE, CSS Opacity

More on patterns although much of this is just good design - e.g. local cacheing where possible, and indicating the ‘newness’ of information (people like that. A web site can feel ‘dusty’)