Uncle Travelling Matt .com — the personal site of Matt Gifford

Just being reading an interesting article on Zombie Copy over at A List Apart. It actually has some very valid points — in an effort to make copy sound good & to make use of that thesaurus, clarity often seems to get lost in a jumble of euphemisms, superlatives and acronyms.

I for one am guilty of this too, the current copy on the my business site contains well… dear I say it, a lot of fluff—written 2-3 years ago when I didn’t know better Fortunately that site is in the process of a major overhaul, copy included.

The value of clearly saying what you mean can’t be underestimated, though it appears it’s often forgotten!

There really is a lot of rubbish information out there on the Internet, presented by so called “experts”. While researching JavaScript performance tuning for a current project, I came across these charming nuggets:

Iterating loops backwards (decrementing) is faster than incrementing, and when looping though DOM objects by tagname, it’s faster to include the getElementsByTagName is the for loop evaluation statement. I wonder how many people blindly accept this stuff?

Profiling the above coding suggestions in gecko (Firefox) and trident (Internet Explorer 6), showed that in all cases the suggestions resulted in speeds that were either the same or slower. In fact, the getElementsByTagName suggestion under Internet Explorer 6 increased the execution time by 250%, not exactly a performance increase! lol.