Crocodoc (YC W10) launches online HTML5 document reader

venturebeat.com

22 points·rhartsock··4 comments

It's a very nice reader. I recommend putting all of your CSS in one external stylesheet and combine your JavaScript into one external script file. While I'm at that your HTTP expiration date for your CSS is tomorrow, even though you have cache busting. Set it to for the longest possible time and just update your cache busting version number when you update the CSS. The benefits are caching. This will be very important for an embedded product. I also recommend not using JavaScript to detect IE versions to load external CSS and JavaScript, especially since you're already using the better means, conditional comments.

I'm a dev at Crocodoc. For document assets, we're doing tremendously obscure things to our CSS and Javascript in order to optimize our document loading experience. The unconventional use of Javascript to embed resources relates our needing to work around a few browser quirks in order to load resources faster when fetching assets from our server.

But yes, we really could do a better job of merging the other browser resources mentioned.

Wow, we're really flattered by these posts on HN (Crocodoc co-founder here).

The HN community has been really supportive of us as we've been working on this. Lim Cheng Soon from Hacker Monthly was even kind enough to give us permission to use some of their PDFs to showcase our viewer.

This PDF (HM issue #1) is one of my favorites: http://crocodoc.com/pUY6tB

Another discussion that appeared a few hours earlier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2226912

Reply on news.ycombinator.com