Here comes PHP 5.3.1

As excited as I was to see the performance benchmarks for PHP 5.3.0
I am glad I resisted temptation and waited a little bit longer.

PHP 5.3.1 is right around the corner, here’s the forthcoming RC1 announcement for August 13th (next Thursday) http://news.php.net/php.internals/45230
(and note “a final release by the end of August”)

and here is an evergrowing list of fixes that will be included:
http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/branches/PHP_5_3/NEWS

Now I just need to make sure eaccelerator is up to speed on 5.3

Firefox 3.5 finally supports DEFER on javascript

I was pleased to discover that after a mere 9 years
that Mozilla/Firefox finally supports defer on javascript.

Yup, 9 years, I couldn’t believe the time either, see for yourself:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28293

What this means is that Firefox finally has a feature
that Internet Explorer has had since version 4 (1997)
(it was made a standard by W3C HTML 4.01 in December 1999)

This means you should be doing this now on all your javascript, inline and external loading:
<script defer="defer" type="text/javascript" ...
(the repeat of the word is simply because of modern validation standards, without it the validation nutters have conniptions)

This causes the script to delay executing until the page is loaded. In some cases the script is also delayed in loading. The short answer is it will make your page seem to load faster for your visitors.

The only time you can’t use DEFER is when you are relying on javascript to inject something inline in your page, ie.
<script defer="defer" type="text/javascript" >
document.write('hello');
</script>
world
will NOT show “hello world” but rather “world hello“.
(if you removed the DEFER it would show “hello world” as expected)

I still don’t know what the status of webkit/safari/chrome is on DEFER or Opera for that matter, much more googling required.