> jQuery.fracs determines the fraction of an HTML element that is currently in the viewport, as well as the fraction it takes of the complete viewport and the fraction of the area that might possibly be visible. It also provides the coordinates of the visible rectangle, absolute (in document space) and relative (in element space).
At first I thought this was kind of overkill for such a 'simple' function but the example of Github shows how important effective presentation of a file list can be. To the average web user the default Apache listing can look 'broken' whereas I would have no problem directing a client to the URL of an index that looked like this.
This is quite nice, however, if you are wanting to serve static content I no longer believe Apache the proper tool for the job. Use cherokee, lighttpd or nginx, they are all faster and have decent file interfaces.
I don't think this is true. Apache with mpm_worker and fastcgi for python/php should perform on a typical dedicated server like nginx till the network is saturated. you also have to consider that .htaccess files are quite cpu intensive because the way apache works they are parsed at every request. put your .htaccess config in the config-file disable unused modules and use mpm worker and I bet the difference is negligible. if you have to count every io operation and you run on small memory nginx may make a difference.
Looking at the way it works, I would imagine that this should be usable even on other web servers. The only key lines are the ones that set the header and footer that do the dirty work. I haven't been able to try the demo (nor have I had time to set it up myself yet), so I don't know how well it works but the screen shots make it look like it could be fairly nice for providing a more familiar interface to a non-computer savy users.
Other web-servers are good, but not that good. People are over-optimizing where there are no needs. One could instead say that you should use a more modern approach to a web-server, and then Nginx or LigHTTPD would be a better solution.
Personally I'd just stick Varnish in front of it and keep using the webserver that I've always felt comfortable with, Apache.
