document.createElement("section")

This workaround for all unrecognised HTML5 elements is available in the form of a tiny 352 bite JS file, from Google Code (uploaded here for your convenience!)

If only it were that easy!

There is one major caveat to this tip, in that I haven’t yet found a way to nest HTML5 elements reliably. This means that there is currently no way to make IE understand this markup:

<section><header></header></section>

As usual, where Internet Explorer is concerned, things are even more convoluted. IE recognises the new elements as XML rather than HTML. This shouldn’t be a major problem, but knowing this helps to avoid potential .nodeName headaches!

John Resig, the creator of jQuery and guru of all things Javascript, has kept us up-to-date nicely on the state of jQuery in 2009. To kick off 2010 we’ll be getting a new version, which is great news for jQuery fans.

The main aim for the jQuery team, as ever, is to improve performance. Version 1.3 included the Sizzle selector engine, which improved selector performance and inspired many articles on how best to optimise your jQuery.

jQuery 1.4 features

jQuery 1.4 includes a slew of improvements and new features, the official roadmap gives a detailed view of what’s been implemented. The big features are:

• four new live event handlers: “change”, “blur”, “submit” and “focus”
• a lazy loader method that requires other scripts be loaded before the document ready function fires
• $.contains which can determine if an element is inside another one eg. $(‘div’).contains(‘ul’)
• syncronised animations (as seen on John’s own example – click on any of the coloured blocks)

Other features include a radioClass method which adds a class to one element and removes it from its siblings, an event listener for the mouse wheel (likely to be very basic) and a “set offset” method which can get or set the specified top and left positions of matched elements, relative to the browser window – a very useful cross-browser method, indeed!

The beta is already out, though naturally not completely bug-free, it’s a preview of what’s to come for those of us who just…can’t…wait!

John recently gave a great talk on Javascript testing. It may be a bit technical for the average jQuery user, but the last section on improvements made in v.1.4 is interesting nonetheless.

jQuery.browser has been superseded by jQuery.support, allowing detection for feature support rather than user agent (which is a very blunt tool). The jQuery team has made it a main objective to remain backwards-compatible, but I always prefer to phase out deprecated methods sooner rather than later.

What’s the answer?

Instead of this:

if (parseInt(jQuery.browser.version) == 6) { ... }

Try this:

if (typeof document.body.style.maxHeight == "undefined"){ ... }

Any script inside the second statement will execute only in browsers that don’t support the maximum-height property, which includes all versions of Internet Explorer up to version 6.

Dynatrace currently only supports Internet Explorer, but it has a lot going for it. Check out the introductory video on their site, or download and dive in.