Top all-time · #445
Paul Irish
Personal blog · paulirish.comwebprogramming
Paul Irish's personal blog at paulirish.com covers web and programming. Since 2009, 127 different Hacker News readers have linked it 170 times, most often “The protocol-relative URL”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paul Irish's blog for browser-internals and front-end performance explainers, such as WebKit for developers, why translate() beats moving elements with top/left, box-sizing: border-box, and protocol-relative URLs.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called a great article, a good video, a good writeup and a great post; told to watch it and to take a look at the Performance section.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The protocol-relative URL10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2010-12-13
- * { box-sizing: border-box } FTW8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2012-02-01
- An open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript with SVG5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2010-01-13
- /2010/the-protocol-relative-url/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-02-25
- The HTML5 Shiv (2011)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-09-26
- /2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-02-06
- 10 Things I Learned from the jQuery Source5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-10-19
- Conditional stylesheets vs CSS hacks4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2009-07-24
- * { box-sizing: border-box } FTW4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-11-19
- 11 More Things I Learned from the jQuery Source4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-01-19
What Hacker News says?
Paul Irish has a great article outlining the technical background of this sort of inter-WebKit diversity: http://paulirish.com/2013/webkit-for-developers/
Comment linking /2013/webkit-for-developers/
on “Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project”Submitted * { box-sizing: border-box } FTW as a story · 348 points
HN discussionIt's a great change not because of IE6 (which, most likely, won't be affected at all) but because of future versions of Internet Explorer. These are now supposed to be released annually, which could be a curse for developers if there was no automatic upgrade mechanism (see: http://paulirish.com/2011/browser-market-pollution-iex-is-th... ). Today's decision of Microsoft means it will be a blessing. Basically, all of…
Comment linking /2011/browser-market-pollution-iex-is-the-new-ie6/
on “Microsoft decides to automatically update Internet Explorer for everyone”Submitted WebKit for Developers as a story · 318 points
HN discussionPretty simple actually, you have 3 images stacked on top of each other, then you track mouse movement and change absolute position of those images in relation to each other depending on mouse movement. p.s. In this example they are changing margins and top/bottom/left/right positions, which is not really a good way to do it, a better way to it is using transform: translate(), it's less resource intensive and especia…
Comment linking /2012/why-moving-elements-with-translate-is-better-than-posabs-topleft/
on “How HTTPS Handshake Happens”Submitted Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] is the new IE6 as a story · 274 points
HN discussionPaul Irish has done a few videos where he walks through some of the jQuery code: http://www.paulirish.com/2010/10-things-i-learned-from-the-j...
Comment linking /2010/10-things-i-learned-from-the-jquery-source/
on “John Resig annotates original jQuery source code”Submitted Chrome Canary for Developers as a story · 86 points
HN discussionRegardless of whether there is a reflow, translate() allows you to do subpixel animation [0]. It will always be smoother than animating CSS position [1]. [0] https://css-tricks.com/tale-of-animation-performance/ [1] https://www.paulirish.com/2012/why-moving-elements-with-tran...
Comment linking /2012/why-moving-elements-with-translate-is-better-than-posabs-topleft/
on “Bouncing DVD Logo”Submitted The HTML5 Shiv (2011) as a story · 76 points
HN discussionFor people who are not familiar with Devtools "A Re-introduction to the Chrome Developer Tools" by Paul Irish http://paulirish.com/2011/a-re-introduction-to-the-chrome-de... "7 MINUTE VIDEOS: JAVASCRIPT CONSOLE PROTIPS & NEWISH DOM APIS" by Paul Irish http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/09/7-minute-videos-Javasc...
Comment linking /2011/a-re-introduction-to-the-chrome-developer-tools/
on “Chrome DevTools could do that?”Submitted The Fundamentals, Primitives and History of HTML5 as a story · 70 points
HN discussionI think you're right. http://www.paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/ This page outlines the original argument, as well as the updated reasoning that you suggest: always use HTTPS if it is available, even if requesting from a page served over HTTP.
Comment linking /2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
on “Google HTML/CSS Style Guide – Omit Optional Tags”Submitted Video Stabilization with FFmpeg and VidStab as a story · 52 points
HN discussionA good video from Paul Irish on the subject http://www.paulirish.com/2011/primitives-html5-video/
Comment linking /2011/primitives-html5-video/
on “Google HTML/CSS Style Guide – Omit Optional Tags”Submitted What feature would improve the web? as a story · 43 points
HN discussionThere's a school of design thought that the FOUT (flash of unstyled text) is worse than delayed text loading so they hide the text and reveal it once the web font is loaded). Browsers even put in a default delay before using the fallback font to appease this point of view, but hacks to enforce it even on slow connections still exist from time to time. https://www.paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/ (Pers…
Comment linking /2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/
on “You are not 'behind'”Submitted The Story of the HTML5 Shiv « Paul Irish as a story · 38 points
HN discussionSuper! Just set up my first secure website with Nginx. Absolutely simple. Literally the only way it could have been easier is if letsencrypt had been installed on my Centos 6.7 box but it was only a `git clone' away. --- 1) Stop the web server. 2) ./letsencrypt-auto certonly --standalone -d _my_domain1_ -d _my_domain2_ ... At the curses prompt give it your contact email address, and accept the licence 3) Edit nginx.…
Comment linking /2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
on “Let's Encrypt has issued its first million certificates”Submitted Paul Irish is Goin' Goog as a story · 30 points
HN discussionProtocol relative URLs for stylesheets unfortunately cause a double download (one for both HTTP and HTTPS) in IE 8 and below, which is a damn shame. Paul Irish has a lot of info on this here: http://paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
Comment linking /2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
on “Web Developer Checklist”Submitted A browser benchmark that has your back: Robohornet as a story · 27 points
HN discussionhaha so obvious yet I completely missed that! I went with a protocol-relative url [0] [0] http://www.paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
Comment linking /2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
on “Google's XSS game”Submitted Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] Is the New IE6 as a story · 22 points
HN discussionNice work. I talked about the effect back at http://paulirish.com/2010/my-harmonious-background-canvas/ And the equivalent code is available on Github: https://github.com/paulirish/harmony
Comment linking /2010/my-harmonious-background-canvas/
on “* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW”Submitted Paul Irish's call for development help and research as a story · 20 points
HN discussionAnnoyingly there's an obnoxious popup on IE6 when doing this http://paulirish.com/2010/the-protocol-relative-url/ Not using protocol relative urls causes a great amount of pain. Unfortunately when you're building content for third party pages you need more graceful degradation than focus stealing dialogues.
Comment linking /2010/the-protocol-relative-url/
on “Firefox 23 will block non-SSL content on SSL pages by default”Submitted A Re-Introduction to the Chrome Developer Tools as a story · 18 points
HN discussionIt should be, it's hardware-accelerated (take a look at the translate3d hack) Paul Irish did a good writeup here: http://www.paulirish.com/2012/why-moving-elements-with-trans...
Comment linking /2012/why-moving-elements-with-translate-is-better-than-posabs-topleft/
on “Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web”Submitted Vendor prefixes are not developer-friendly as a story · 13 points
HN discussion
