Nicole Sullivan

Category: Geek

  • Overflow – a secret benefit

    Overflow does some cool things you should know about. Creates Block Formatting Context Clears Floats Generating block formatting context Arnaud Gueras called this “contexte de formattage” years ago, and I was kind of surprised when I moved back to the US how few developers here had heard of this “secret weapon”. When the overflow property…

  • CSS Summit – test cases for browser bugs

    Speaking the CSS Summit today, I listened as people voiced concerns about browser support and bugs. It might surprise my fellow CSS developers, but many of the seasoned, bearded (ok, I’m making this part up) engineers working on the innards of browsers and rendering engines may not actually write much CSS themselves. They need our…

  • The Year of Business Metrics – Don’t make your users run away!

    A marked change has occurred since the first Velocity Conference a year ago, and while the effects are not yet obvious, they will be. The web is still slow, but we have something now, that we didn’t a year ago: business metrics. This was the year we quantified the impact of performance choices on our…

  • Smush.it finds a home at Yahoo!

    Today is a great day for Smush it because Yahoo! decided to accept it into their family of tools. This will allow the tool to run on fanatically maintained servers, with the Yahoo! style quality of service. It doesn’t get any better than that. I feel like my baby is all grown up and going…

  • Reflows & Repaints: CSS Performance making your JavaScript slow?

    I’ve been tweeting and posting to delicious about reflows and repaints, and it seemed time for a blog post. Opera lists repaint and reflow as one of the three main contributors to sluggish JavaScript, so it definitely seems worth a look. Reflows are very expensive in terms of performance, and is one of the main…

  • Object Oriented CSS video on YDN

    Yahoo! Developer Network has released a video of my Object Oriented CSS talk at Web Directions North just in time for Ada Lovelace day. I’ve also been included in a feature on Women in Technology. I’m absolutely flattered to be included among these fantastic technical women. Wow. Object Oriented CSS: for high performance websites and…

  • Object Oriented CSS, Grids on Github

    My Object Oriented CSS grids and templates are open sourced on github. They have all the functionality of YUI grids plus some important features. Only 4kb, half the size of YUI grids. (I was totally happy when I checked the final size!) They allow infinite nesting and stacking. The only change required to use any…

  • CSS doesn’t suck, you’re just doing it wrong.

    A bit of a rant The cascade is something like a new data structure, and the ways for dealing with it are algorithms you never learned in school. You couldn’t have, because traditional engineering school poo-poos the front-end and web engineering in favor of stale (but still valuable) traditional software engineering. Perhaps you realized this…

  • Design Fast Websites – Don’t blame the rounded corners! on YUI Theater

    I visited Yahoo! last week to record a talk I had given at the Front End Summit in October. If you are a designer or an F2E it is essential that you understand the ways in which design choices impact overall site performance. This talk establishes guidelines for High Performance Design including 9 Best Practices.…

  • ParisWeb Performance Web Videos et slides disponible

    80% des problèmes de performance Web se situe au niveau des échanges avec le navigateur et sur le navigateur lui-même : échanges réseau, rendu dans le navigateur, organisation des composants dans une page etc. Nous aborderons les principales problématiques et les solutions à mettre en Å“uvre. Forts de l’expérience de l’équipe performance de Yahoo!, à…