If you are developing client-side re-usable scripting objects, sooner or later you will find yourself spotting out memory leaks. Chances are that your browser will suck memory like a sponge and you will hardly be able to find a reason why your lovely DHTML navigation’s responsiveness decreases severely after visiting a couple of pages within your site.
In the past, memory leaks haven’t posed huge problems for Web developers. Pages were kept relatively simple and navigation between different locations within a site was a great way to clean up any loose memory. If there was a leak, it was most likely small enough to go unnoticed.
[Via MSDN]
Plugging memory leaks in JavaScript is easy enough when you know what causes them. In this article authors Kiran Sundar and Abhijeet Bhattacharya walk you through the basics of circular references in JavaScript and explain why they can cause problems in certain browsers, especially when combined with closures. After seeing some of the common memory leak patterns you should watch out for, you’ll learn a variety of easy ways to work around them.
[Via IBM]
Event Cache is a small script which can store the events you have set on a page and remove them on unload. This way it can prevent memory leakage. Please read DHTML leaks like a sieve by Joel Webber for more information.
[Via Novemberborn]
Yet another bug in the oldest, poorest, most unmaintained and most buggy browser in the last 5 years, Internet Explorer. Some time ago I was doing some tests with one of my products. Worked really fine, in all browsers, including IE. The problem I’m talking about here is a little harder to detect.
[Via Mishoo]
You heard me: Like a sieve. Gobs and gobs of memory. Necessarily. “Gee, that’s funny”, you might say, “My browser doesn’t seem to leak noticably”. And you’re probably right. However, the design of both major browsers (Internet Explorer and Mozilla) leaks memory necessarily (To be honest, I’m not sure about Safari and Opera, but it wouldn’t surprise me).
[Via JGWebber]
Quite by accident I found the article DHTML Leaks Like a Sieve by Joel Webber. It’s an interesting read that I can recommend to all JavaScripters. Also, it may have disturbing implications for my current coding practices.
[Via Quirksmode]
Making pop-ups is easy! These simple lessons should get you started.
I love pop-up cards. I love to make them, send them, and receive them. But as anyone who has tried to design their own cards knows, creating these things is really hard. You have to cut, glue, fold, test, modify, cut, glue, test, on and on forever in order to get the pieces to move correctly. If the card is even mildly complicated, designing the card can become an endless project.
A CSS problem I have been wrestling with lately is how to create a bulletproof shrinkwrapping graphic button. By that I mean an image-based button that will expand and contract to fit the amount of text it contains. It is a very useful technique for CMS-driven sites that allow the client to change the text that is displayed on buttons, as well as for multilingual sites.
[Via 456 BereaST]
