Use Google's Closure Compiler in C#
A few days ago, Google released their Closure Compiler project for optimizing JavaScript. Here’s what they write about the Closure Compiler: The Closure Compiler is a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster. It is a true compiler for JavaScript. Instead of compiling from a source language to machine code, it compiles from JavaScript to better JavaScript. It parses your JavaScript, analyzes it, removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what's left. The interesting part of the Closure Compiler is that it not only removes whitespace, it also rewrites your JavaScript code to make it smaller and

Use iframes with XHTML 1.0 Strict
Recently I had to use iframes on a website conforming to XHTML 1.0 Strict. As you might know, the XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype doesn’t allow the use of iframes. The XHTML 1.0 Transitional doctype on the other hand, does allow you to use iframes, but I don’t like to use that doctype. The reason is, as the name implies, that it’s a doctype meant for make the transition from HTML into XHTML – a sort of a temporary solution. When building new websites I like to use a strict doctype because it doesn’t allow for many of the style and behavioral tags that is much better placed in stylesheets and JavaScript. What’s needed i

Verify JavaScript syntax using C#
In the past few days, I’ve worked on finding a way to do static code analysis on JavaScript files. There exist some tools for linting JavaScript like JavaScript Lint, but linting only checks syntax and not implementation. To do that I found the Jscript compiler build into the .NET Framework to be just what I wanted. It compiles JavaScript and reports if it finds any errors. To test it out, I wrote a simple C# class that takes an array of JavaScript files to compile. I then called the class from a unit test, so I could make the test fail if the compiler finds any errors with the script files. The class contains a single public meth

Meta-tag bypasses IE8 checks
Internet Explorer 8 introduced a new mechanism for ensuring backwards compatibility with websites built for IE7, so "the web" didn't break with IE8's more standards compliant rendering. You could tell IE8 to render your website as IE7 and therefore avoid having to fix potential problems with markup or stylesheets. You can do that in two different ways: Using a meta-tag:<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" /> or this HTTP header:X-UA-Compatible: IE=7 This puts IE8 into IE7 rendering mode. You can read more about how and why this was done and made into a standard at

Scale in the browser
Last week a colleague and I gave a talk about scalable architecture and where my colleague talked about databases and application layer scaling, I talked about scaling websites. More precisely, we talked about the upcoming ZYB/Vodafone project.  Since there’s still a lot of secrecy about the project, we managed to keep the concepts general. General or not, I’d like to share some thoughts on a different way of scaling websites. Load balancing Larger websites are often hosted on multiple web servers under a