Surfin' Safari

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Pardon the mess. Redesign currently in progress.

Update: Redesign is still ongoing, with files left to upload, etc. I'm putting the redesign on hold, though, until after Return of the King. I'm sure you understand. :)

In my earlier blog entry on caching problems, the issue of CSS being overly aggressive about fetching background-images was mentioned. I have fixed the issue now so that background images will only be fetched when first used. Sites like SprintPCS load much more quickly with this fix.

WebCore now supports values of always for page-break-before and page-break-after. I followed the CSS2.1 specification very closely, which says you can only apply these properties to block level elements in the root's block formatting context. I suspect other browsers may be more lax in their acceptance of these properties, so if anyone has real-world sites I can test, post them here.

It sounds like there are two primary caching complaints that come up over and over in my blog comments. The first is that Safari caches subresources too aggressively, and the second is that Safari fetches subresources too aggressively. :)

We found the first problem. The WebCore cache was not actually making use of the proper expiration dates, which meant the WebCore memory cache would keep using stale objects even though they should have expired. We have fixed the problem, and we believe this will solve the vast majority of the stale content issues.

We've made fantastic progress in WebCore since 1.1. Here are a few of the highlights:
(1) Border collapsing in tables
(2) DHTML performance improvements (including optimized layout paths for positioned elements and smart repainting when objects move).
(3) Support for tabbing to all controls in a web page
(4) Support for the css2 outline property
(5) Support for the css2 cursor property
(6) Support for tabbing to links in a web page
(7) Tabindex support
(8) The title attribute is now displayed in a tooltip
(9) Small-caps support (synthesized as in other browsers)
(10) Marquees (flame away)
(11) Support for the DOM click() method
(12) Support for window.print()
(13) DOM lvl 2 (and even 3) event handling improvements
(14) better support for malformed HTML
(15) Minimum font size fixed to be like it was in Safari 1.0
(16) Smart line breaking so that long URLs don't screw up page content
(17) The two bugs listed here are fixed
(18) Major improvements to :before/:after handling, including support for floating and positioning :before/:after content (css2 did not allow this, css2.1 does). Many of the bugs described here are fixed.
(19) The first-letter/text-transform "text doubling" bug is fixed.
(20) :first-letter now works even when applied across spans, so the letter T in Thoughts from Eric on meyerweb.com now shows up properly.
(21) :hover/:active have been rewritten to be faster and to avoid bugs related to hovering over floats and relative positioned elements. Fixes the problems on diveintomark and mezzoblue.com.
(22) Many of the crashes/hangs reported via the Safari bug button have been addressed.

Keep the feedback coming!