Comments on: The New Timers

By: Frank Thuerigen

Frank Thuerigen — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 22:39:55 +0000

to prevent the borg from taking over.

By: Photoflock

Photoflock — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:16:37 +0000

Ok, yesterday I would’ve kicked myself for not realizing that this was an april fool’s post; luckily today is today and I can chalk up my stupidity to the fact that it’s the 3rd of april now. Why are april fools stories still on the front page? :(

By: Jeffrey Robbins

Jeffrey Robbins — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:30:52 +0000

Here I was thinking it was another article by a JS developer with WAY too much time on his hands, creating yet another shining example of what happens when someone with too much brain power decides to code some Javascript.

…Then I read the whitespace paragraph, and remembered to check the date of the article. Good one guys… :-)

By: Andy Hume

Andy Hume — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 11:27:47 +0000

The blink one had me hook-line-and-sinker, but the whitespace gave it away. 1 – 2MB of whitespace – hilarious! :)

By: Ivan

Ivan — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 23:41:57 +0000

Mr. gullible here

By: Frank Thuerigen

Frank Thuerigen — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 22:25:39 +0000

Glad you like it… ;-) any comment on the named issue is much appreciated…
Back on topic: I noticed your HP favicon blinks every once in a while. Is that due to the adamant precision of the timer you tried so hard to hide away from the community?

By: Dean Edwards

Dean Edwards — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 21:49:58 +0000

@Frank – message received. It looks very interesting.

By: Frank Thuerigen

Frank Thuerigen — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 21:10:37 +0000

Both blink frequency and timer implementation are OS API calls, so there is no specific difference and for both you can say they count within the OS capabilities of precision. Linux is more precise in that than WinXX, but no substantial gain here.
BTW Dean I sent you an eMail to d@e.n and that was no april joke… ;-) I hope you considered reading it :-)

By: kourge

kourge — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:31:55 +0000

You forgot to mention that the ECMA just decided that JavaScript 2.0 will support Ook! datatypes and goto constructs.

By: Adnan Siddiqi

Adnan Siddiqi — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 20:11:18 +0000

hehee a good try :-)

By: Dean Edwards

Dean Edwards — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 19:11:21 +0000

These “jokes” aren’t such bad ideas. I know that Mozilla has problems with setTimeout(). And the BLINK tag was invented by Mozilla. So maybe there is some kind of event that fires for the BLINK element that is more reliable that setTimeout? And using whitespace to force a rendering delay doesn’t seem stupid either. Not if you document.write() it. I always fall for April Fools jokes anyway. This year is probably no exception. I’m offer to look for BLINK related events…

By: add

add — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:12:17 +0000

my god, i thought you guys went nuts…

By: Shawn K

Shawn K — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 16:39:58 +0000

That joke made me cry, it was that awful.
My april fool’s day has been ruined, I can no longer laugh.

By: Dragan

Dragan — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 15:55:49 +0000

I am using combination of document.newThread() and document.sleep()

By: naterkane

naterkane — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 15:28:02 +0000

I’m waiting for the w3c to include the very undersupported tag for HTML 5, word on the street, is (thankfully) it’s right around the corner.
I finally feel like I can think about retiring my Behavior.Seizure library, and won’t have to deal with rewriting doSeizure() to support the latest version of JAWS.

By: Chris Huff

Chris Huff — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 15:13:55 +0000

I nearly cried when I read “followed by 1-2MB of whitespace.” LOL, great stuff.

By: Philipp

Philipp — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 15:07:46 +0000

What i really loved was that the post has an exact rating of 4.1 when I hit the site. Thought it was intentional, but it doesnÂ´t seem so when I rechecked it with another browser

By: Cody Swann

Cody Swann — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:10:36 +0000

I know we’re not serious here, but don’t you mean setInterval? Wouldn’t the blink tag, which “runs” continuously be more analogous to the setInterval function, which runs continuously until cleared, rather than setTimeout, which runs once?

By: digitarald

digitarald — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 13:06:03 +0000

I don’t use setTimeout, i use fn.delay ;) This april google is number april fools winner :D

By: Frank Thuerigen

Frank Thuerigen — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 12:51:37 +0000

Yep I use a much simpler version of it, the
userBored() function.
It looks like that:
-
while ( userBored() == false ) {
// continue displaying same content
}
-
When the user is bored by the never-changing content, he can click on one of those underlined thingys that display other content.
-
Works like charm, with and without JS, crossbrowser compatible and it is fully compliant with the blink tag solution.