Musings

I’m still a relative newcomer to the programming and web development world. I started actively doing web stuff including programming and design around the time I started using StackOverflow, 22 months ago at the time of writing this.

StackOverflow helped me get my base foundation doing web stuff when I didn’t have a teacher around to guide me (which, looking back, I’m thankful for). I thought of things differently then and was unaware of techniques that I know now. Having people answer specific questions I had and getting help applying them to my situation helped me understand the thought behind the concept as well as reduced the time it took to find the answers myself.

StackOverflow was a big part in landing my first internship and

Why should I not use a table for my layout?

This question has been discussed on Stack Overflow as well as many other sites. I’ll summarize the main points here.

We should use tables, but only for tabular data because it is incorrect, and more difficult to use tables for layout.

Nowadays I see that the majority of websites are using JavaScript for their animations. I remember the days when Flash was usually used to fulfill those tasks.

Questions:

1. What are the advantages of using JavaScript instead of Flash? Yes I know about the performance, but are the other advantages?
2. Web developers could use JavaScripts at that point in time, why did they choose Flash anyway?

When working with a very dynamic UI (think Single Page App) with potentially large JS libraries, view templates, validation, ajax, animations, etc… what are some strategies that will help minimize or reduce the time the browser spends on reflow?

For example, we know there are many ways to accomplish a DIV size change but are there techniques that should be avoided (from a reflow standpoint) and how do the results differ between browsers?

It’s best to try and avoid changing DOM elements whenever possible. At times you can prevent reflow at all by sticking to CSS properties or, if required, using CSS’ transforms so that the element itself is not affected at all but, instead the visual state is just changed.

I understand that the overall goal is to stay responsive, but what is the purpose of avoiding pixels?