Let's Build the Web We Want
I’ve read all the articles and I’m still compelled to write rules like this one I wrote earlier tonight:
#main-menu .primary a{
color:#7b0000;
}
I know I’m not alone in using rules like that. It’s a super common pattern.
Continue reading “How Difficult Is It To Avoid Expensive CSS Selectors?”
I finally finished reading Even Faster Web Sites. It’s good, but in terms of things for my day to day, it’s kind of a mixed bag. In some ways (specifically in the areas of JavaScript efficiency, image compression and CSS selectors) it’s more practical than High Performance Web Sites and in others I had a hard time coming up with a concrete example that I’d actually run across that would be served by the topic at hand.
With that in mind, looking at the table of contents I found the bolded chapters most interesting for my day-to-day coding (your mileage may vary, of course)
Chapter 1. Understanding Ajax Performance
Chapter 2. Creating Responsive Web Applications
Chapter 3. Splitting the Initial Payload
Chapter 4. Loading Scripts Without Blocking
Chapter 5. Coupling Asynchronous Scripts
Chapter 6. Positioning Inline Scripts
Chapter 7. Writing Efficient JavaScript
Chapter 8. Scaling with Comet
Chapter 9. Going Beyond Gzipping
Chapter 10. Optimizing Images
Chapter 11. Sharding Dominant Domains
Chapter 12. Flushing the Document Early
Chapter 13. Using Iframes Sparingly
Chapter 14. Simplifying CSS Selectors
Appendix A. Performance Tools
Which isn’t to say that the other chapters weren’t interesting. They were, I just don’t need to deal with some of the issues solved by those techniques very often in my day job. That was especially true of the the Comet chapter and many of the issues related to managing multiple script files and/or large blocks of JS code.
Some comments on the chapters I found most interesting:
Continue reading “Even Faster Web Sites (Review)”
This may be of interest to some of you:
In this webinar, you will learn how Amazon CloudFront can improve the performance of your website and cost you less than a traditional content delivery service (CDN). Amazon CloudFront is an easy to use, high performance content delivery service that lets you quickly and cost-effectively deliver website content to your users using a global network of edge locations in the United States, Europe and Asia.
You will learn how Amazon CloudFront is different from most traditional CDNs and how easy it is to get started.
Increase the Performance of Your Website With Amazon CloudFront
I use CloudFront at both home and work and love it. It’s cheap and performs as advertised. Low-latency, high transfer speeds, rock solid uptime (pingdom has yet to report a problem in nine months) and utilizing edge locations is an obvious benefit (especially to the healthy percentage of visitors my personal site has in Europe.) So, if you’re at all interested maybe the above will be just the thing to get you started.
Why bothers? Well, for performance geeks it’s the easiest way to clear Yahoo’s performance rule #2. Don’t you want to be a cool performance geek?
I thought I’d (gently) toss some links at you:
As it stands, I’m always storing bits of data in globally accessible places (either in the DOM or in a namespaced Data object,) and I always have to document what I’m doing so having a standard place to park data is great.
The fact that it stretches across an entire session? I love it. Especially since it’s so straightforward when compared with cookies. I hate dealing with cookies. It feels like coding through a time machine. sessionStorage is much more modern. Convenience FTW.
Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’ll get some computationally expensive problem and will end up using them next week or something.
We worked together on the redesign of CramerOnline.com where we used Cufon for headers, so it’s very topical around the office.
Quick verdict on Cufon, btw? Slightly tricky, but definitely ready for prime time 🙂
It’s with that in mind that the good press Windows 7 is getting should be greeted with great joy by web developers the world over. While many IT departments skipped over upgrading to Vista (I know of what I speak, we use XP at work), the lure of Windows 7 might be too much for them to ignore.
Which would mean IE8 would get a big bump.
And I would dance a little jig.
Thanks to Jason Duclos, my presentation from a couple of weeks ago is live. In it I compare standard JavaScript DOM methods to YUI, jQuery, Dojo and Prototype/Scriptaculous.
JavaScript Library Showdown from rob larsen on Vimeo.
Jason is the man for putting this together, by the way.