Eric Goldsmith’s Blog

Yahoo! released version 0.9 of YSlow recently. The release notes offer the highlights, but this blog entry by one of the developers provides more details.

I haven’t had a chance to spend much time with the new release, but it promises to address what I saw as the biggest shortcoming of prior releases - that it only crawled the DOM and didn’t capture network traffic. The new version promises to do both, providing a much more complete picture.

I was a bit disappointed to see that a bug I had reported in prior versions still remains - YSlow falsely identifies redirects. For example, today on www.aol.com there are 3 redirects, but YSlow identified 20 - the other 17 are listed as “redirects to <blank>” .

Nevertheless, a great tool.

The state of the Mobile Web has bothered me for some time. So, I’m putting my money where my mouth is, and learning more about the attempts at standards, like W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative, and the challenges.

I’ve been using a BlackBerry 8800 for a few months now. Mainly for access to my company’s e-mail and calendar, but also for IM and Web access. This is the first BlackBerry, or Smartphone for that matter, I’ve used, and I must say that I’m sold.

Having a mobile Web browser with me all the time, I find myself trying to look up movie reviews while I’m browsing videos at Blockbuster. Or trying to do a price comparison for something I see at a local retail store. Or trying to find (and reserve) a book at my local library, that someone just recommended in a conversation. I don’t want to wait until I get back to a computer to do these things, I want to do them in real-time, from where I am.

Notice I said “trying” in each case above. Nearly every time I try something like this, I come away frustrated and disappointed because the Web sites are barely usable (and sometimes not at all) on a mobile device.

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