Category: Performance
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The hacktastic zoom fix
Everyone keeps asking me what is with all the “x” in the OOCSS grids… so I finally wrote an article. The short answer is that it isn’t just a clearfix (it does that too), but it also causes the element to stretch wide, even when it has very little content. It is a bit of…
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Guest on The Big Web Show
This week I had the good fortune to spend an hour talking with Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin about all things CSS on The Big Web Show. It was lively and fun despite my cell phone making weird noises during the podcast. (Ooops, sorry!) We talked about progressive enhancement, carpentry, testing, rounded corners, oocss, performance,…
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Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS
Last week, Stoyan Stefanov and I spoke at Velocity Conference about optimizing massive CSS. We talked about our experiences optimizing large-scale sites like Facebook and Yahoo!, and we discussed our findings regarding the CSS efficiency of the Alexa Top 1000 websites. Velocity was kind enough to share videos of the session. What is the state…
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The media object saves hundreds of lines of code
What is the internet made of? At least the UI layer is mainly composed of media blocks. I talked about the Facebook stream story before, and all the tiny objects of which it is composed. For the most part, the stream story is made up of the media object repeated over and over. The media…
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How to create CSS objects? Get the granularity right!
In my previous post, I said: Shoehorning CSS and HTML into PHP abstractions prevents the code from being DRY and ultimately leads to code bloat, because, the CSS and HTML require a far more granular object structure than the PHP. And then I didn’t expand on it, or give proper context. Ooops, sorry! In the…
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Visual Semantics in HTML and CSS
Each layer in the web stack has its own architecture. You wouldn’t expect the DB schema to be used to architect the PHP middleware, and yet people expect that of the HTML and CSS. HTML needs to be written with a sense of the meaning of the data or content, something I call code semantics.…
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CSS Wish List
Don’t get me wrong, I think CSS is awesome. It is a great way of defining the UI, but it could be even better. I’m excited about the special effects, transitions, and graphic elements currently being added to the CSS specification. They will help us write faster pages by eliminating the need for UI graphics…
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HTML5, who is bad enough to take on canvas?
I recently went to New York to hang with some people who are interested in HTML5 and figure out what I thought about the future of this web standard. I’m a skeptic by nature, so I went into our little quest expecting to be unimpressed by HTML5, but in fact, it isn’t so bad, and…
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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…
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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…