Stubbornella

The Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo! added 20 new performance rules and refined some of the original rules. I’m really excited about this; this performance goodness is just what developers need to accelerate the user experience even further.

1. Flush the buffer early
2. Use GET for AJAX requests
3. Post-load components
4. Preload components
5. Reduce the number of DOM elements
6. Split components across domains
7. Minimize the number of iframes
8. No 404s
9. Reduce cookie size
10. Use cookie-free domains for components
11. Minimize DOM access
12. Develop smart event handlers
13. Choose <link> over @import
14. Avoid filters
15. Optimize images
16. Optimize CSS sprites
17. Don’t scale images in HTML
18. Make favicon.ico small and cacheable
19. Keep components under 25K [mobile]
20. Pack components into a multipart document

Stay tuned, we’ve got more tricks up our sleeve.

The emergence of CSS Frameworks doesn’t prove the necessity of a major overhaul of the CSS Spec. Rather it is indicative of the maturity of the medium. Java programmers don’t rewrite the math class every time they code a new application. If you are reinventing the wheel each time you write CSS, you’re doing it wrong.

Steve wrote an article about semantics. He does a good job of explaining his process.
We need to teach newbies to take a slightly broader view. Imagine, for example, an action list, which allows you to execute a certain number of actions relative to the context in which it is found. Think; “print”, [...]

It is hard to remember not to make any mention of pants, even if I know what it means in British English. Beyond telling Murray Rowen that I liked his underwear in front of a crowd of people, I recently went to London to speak at the Front-end Summit being held there. I gave two talks. The first was High Performance Websites in particular the impact of choices made by front-end engineers. The second talk was about Architecting High Performance CSS.

Yahoo has released the much awaited (by me at least!) YSlow firebug extension which tests download speed and gives recommendations based on the famous 14 rules for fast web pages.

Half of my resume was missing. It was there on the screen, but in print preview and on the printed page reams of experience disappeared. Not ideal.

I discovered that when you use the formatting context to clear floats, firefox treats each printed page as a “box” with the overflow hidden. Elements with overflow: hidden applied will be printed partially or not at all.

I’m not a proponent of lowering skill level for diversities sake, but is it possible that there are CSS Goddesses on the A-list in terms of technical skill, speaking ability, and vision who simply aren’t on the radar of the web development community?

Un site accessibles et un site inaccessibles peuvent paraître exactement les mêmes pour un utilisateur qui n’est pas handicapé. Il peut alors être difficile de comprendre les raisons de tout ce remue-ménage. Pourquoi est-il aussi important de tenir compte de cette accessibilité lorsqu’on conçoit et lorsqu’on met en forme des pages Internet ?

If your visitors have visited Yahoo! or another YUI using site today there is a chance the library will be in their cache since they are now offering free hosting of the library on their servers. This just rocks. It means that normal people get to take advantage of the lightning fast Yahoo [...]

A List Apart has launched a new site design. They had a couple seconds of style-less content, and then boom, the new site was born. At first glance it is a 1000px wide, four column design based on ruby on rails. Take a look.
New design. New structure. New server. New publishing system [...]

bobbyvandersluis.com | Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) v1.0
A great article which explains a useful way to include flash content in your website without compromising standards.

I attended WWW2005 in Chiba, Japan, just outside of Tokyo. It was a fun conference. I met lots of great people, and saw some people I hadn’t in a while.

I am working on a site for Mason where he can record his adventures rebuilding a Morgan with his father-in-law. The design is going alright, and I have only two gripes.

Allowing writers to contribute to the creation of accessible documents.

The testing was based on the needs of non-technical content contributors; writers, graphic artists, editors, etc. The program had to shield the user from all the code and provide a simple usable interface.

It is reasonable to expect writers to be able to update documents and follow preexisting styles without substantially compromising accessibility. However, they won’t be able to create or change the overall look and feel of the documents. This type of change requires familiarity with CSS and XHTML, even in the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. With proper planning, this limitation can actually help insure consistency across large documents. . .

I became a geek by accident. I was a groupie for ages and then it just kind of rubbed off on me. I am eager to collect my links before they get lost.  The resources for learning to design well are out there, but hard to find and evaluate until you know the [...]