A+ Ajax

Shim was developed within the Boston Globe’s media lab as a way to study how Web sites look on various devices and browsers. A laptop intercepts all wifi traffic – this is redirected to a custom node.js server – which inserts a javascript, or “shim,” at the head of each web page that is visited.

The shim, once loaded in a device’s browser, opens and maintains a socket connection to the server, according to to Shim’s developers. Shim was written in 2011 by Chris Marstall, Creative Technologist at the Boston Globe. The software has been open sourced. Write the Shim originators on git.hub:

Whenever a new page is requested, the page’s URL is broadcast to all connected browsers, which then redirect themselves to that URL, keeping all devices in sync. Shim info is available on git.hub.

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With Google and their apps like Search, Docs or GMail only a very small time is actually spent in the initial page load, writes Andreas Grabner in a recent blog post. Of course, much time is spent in JavaScript, XHR Calls and DOM Manipulations triggered by user actions. Grabner writes:

It is very important to speed up Page Load Time – don’t get me wrong. It is the initial perceived performance by a user who interacts with your site. But it is not all we need to focus on. Most of the time in modern web applications is spent in JavaScript, DOM Manipulations, XHR Calls and Rendering that happen after the initial page load. Automatic verification against Best Practices won’t work here anymore because we have to analyze individual user actions that do totally different things. The way this will work is to analyze the individual user actions, track performance metrics and automate regression detection based on these measured values.

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this post is a placeholder test.

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html5test.com is a site by Niels Leenheer that runs a series of (currently) 160 tests on your browser. The tests are grouped into:

• Doctype
• Canvas
• Video
• Audio
• Geolocation
• Storage
• Offline Web Applications
• Workers
• Section elements
• Grouping content elements
• Text-level semantic elements
• Forms
• User interaction

This is a good start, but help him out with new areas to test! Having a simple “count” did wonders for Acid in many ways, but suffers from the flaw that every test isn’t equal. Missing a couple of obscure tests isn’t worst than missing a large piece of functionality that is only accounted for in one test for example.

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