Last week one of my team members gave a presentation to the rest of us on Coldbox. We are using this framework for a project and we were discussing the basics of convention and how to work with the different layers - which brought up the question, where exactly is the optimal place to put the Javascript in this?.

I used this opportunity to bring up the CFHTMLHEAD tag, which allows you to place code into the head tag from anywhere on the page. This would allow us to keep Javascript from loading on unnecessary pages and still keep everything componentized. I also thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss basic CFHTMLHEAD usage.

[More]

Page load time is very important, if a page takes too long to load some users will just leave and may never come back. Below are two tools that I find very useful when doing page optimizations.

[More]

As I continue my work with the re-design of one of our pages, I re-discovered a specific aspect of CSS that I wanted to share.

To fully understand this concept, you must know that a "Parent" element is an element that contains other elements. The elements contained within a parent element are all referred to as "Children".

We are going to explore CSS's "child selector" and "decendant selector". It's all in the name with these two. The main difference is that the "child selector" only affects immediate children of a parent element, whereas the "descendant selector" affects all of the children, grandchildren and lower, of a particular parent element.

Here are some examples:

[More]

As many of us know, testing in Internet Explorer is tough because you can't run multiple versions of IE on the same computer (and the same CSS can render VERY differently across versions).

This is a neat tool that Cindi passed along to the rest of the Ravenglass team a couple of weeks ago. This allows you to test the way JavaScript and CSS are rendered across the different versions of IE, without having to jump through hoops.

http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

I installed it this week because I have been doing some redesign work, with some CSS that might not be compatible across browsers and I am hooked! Testing across browsers was a breeze with this - so compelling that I had to write a quick blog entry about it.

'Til next time, Bridget