Archive for the ‘javascript’ Category

Display access keys automatically

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

I have written a Javascript routine which displays a list of the available access keys at the bottom of the page.

Maintaining a list of access keys used for each individual page was going to be a tiresome exercise. As Javascript can interrogate a page for this information, it seemed a little silly manually creating the same result.

So, I give you access_keys, an unobtrusive Javascript routine that searches for and displays access keys that it finds at the bottom of each webpage. Now available on GitHub with full instructions.

Thanks go to Radio New Zealand for inspiring this effort and then releasing it to the world.

Javascript speed test results [UPDATED to include Google Chrome]

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Test case: sorting a table containing 750 rows of data. Using the table-kit library.

Browser Time
Internet Explorer 6.0 (using an XP virtual machine) 19 seconds
Internet Explorer 8.0b2 (using an XP virtual machine) 5 seconds
Firefox 3.0 8 seconds
Firefox 3.1b1 pre 8 seconds
Safari 3.1.2 4 seconds
Webkit trunk (31 Aug 2008) 4 seconds
Google Chrome 9 seconds

It’s great to see modern browsers executing Javascript so fast. It will be interesting to see how Safari 4.0 compares, which is due to be released shortly.