It doesn’t seem that there are a lot of people, practically nobody, reading this blog. This just won’t do. I’m going explore the ways to promote it as soon as I get some free time and several of my future posts will likely be on what I’ve tried and if there’s any immediate noticeable result.

Returning back to the floating in IE now. I’ve been working with CSS lately attempting to improve visual presentation of the menu control and encountered the following problem. Imagine there’s an element with some script responsible for updating the CSS class of the element when the mouse pointer moves over it or in response to some other event. The behavior I’ve observed was that if the element is floating, to the left or to the right, or is inside of a floating box (any of the parent nodes are floating) the event handler takes longer to complete. I suspect when the class of the element is modified it takes longer for IE to visually update the element than if it would not have been floating, and so the script runs longer. Firefox doesn’t seem to have this problem, but then again Firefox script engine seems to be faster. Whatever the cause it would be nice if the problem would be mentioned somewhere in IE documentation. I won’t be surprised if there are other problems of similar nature with the CSS elements.

The worst part is that a lot of CSS problems are unpredictable. In certain cases they appear, in some they don’t. I remember having the problem (described above) when I was limiting the width of a list (<ul> tag), but it disappeared if I started to limit the width via child’s (<li> tag) CSS style object. Now there doesn’t seem to be any problem no matter if I limit the size of the list or the list item. I’ve also seen reports that relative width ("width: xx%") or placement of the link pointing to the CSS sheet (body vs. head) can affect the browser’s performance - http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/Browser_Issues/Q_21140730.html. It’d be nice if there would exist some kind of list of what implications certain CSS properties may have on the browser’s performance. I couldn’t find anything on connection between CSS and the browser performance, so if you have any additional information on the subject I would love to hear about it. If at some point I get enough data I might even publish a list on my own if there isn’t one by that time.