10/25/2006: Use CSS to Ensure Common Navigation HTML on Every Page
This tip was developed (or at least described by) Trenton Moss on the ITWALES.com site. I reproduce the essential elements of only one of the ten tips that he writes about. Please visit itwales.com to see all ten.
Add a class to each navigation item:
<ul>
<li><a href="#" class="home">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="about">About us</a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="contact">Contact us</a></li>
</ul>
Then insert an id into the <body> tag that indicates which are it represents. For example, When in ‘Home’ it should read <body id=”home”>. Now create a CSS rule:
#home .home, #about .about, #contact .contact {
commands for highlighted navigation go here
}
10/08/2006: Using Composite Object For Hash Key Better Than Concatenated String
Kirk Pepperdine has written a guest article for the Java Specialists’ newsletter about the DRY or Don’t Repeat Yourself principle.
While I agree with DRY, the important part of the article was his performance timing study. He compared using
personsByName.put(firstName + lastName, person);
versus
personsByName.put(new CompositeKey(firstName, lastName), person);
Cutting to the result of the test, the composite key cut the example’s execution by 66% and reduced memory consumption by about 65Mb. Visit the link above for more details or simply use Composite keys from now on!