Stubbornella - Nicole Sullivan

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 of the internet regarding CSS performance? Kind of sad. We aren’t getting a lot of the basics right, and when we look at the more advanced techniques, there are some spectacular examples of what-not-to-do. Why do we care about CSS performance? As Stoyan talks about in the beginning of the video, it blocks progressive rendering and it is very difficult to auto-minify.

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 object is an image to the left, with descriptive content to the right, like this Facebook story:

It is a very simple object, but it is very powerful. We can eliminate many lines of code abstracting this repeating pattern. The code for the media block and many other “web Lego” are available on the Object Oriented CSS open source project.

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 PHP layer, the following stream story (from facebook) might be a single object. All of the logic of determining which bits of HTML to show or hide are contained within one object structure.

Frequently, developers try to make the CSS match this middle-end logic. We expect all the CSS code for the stream story to be sand-boxed within a wrapper id, for example #story. This ends up with bloated code that isn’t DRY. Why? because the proper architecture for the CSS layer is much more granular. Trying to base the CSS architecture on the PHP layer is something akin to trying to use the DB schema to configure apache. It just doesn’t work.

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. Code semantics are incredibly important in the HTML for both portability and accessibility. On the other hand, CSS really is a separate layer in the stack, and it needs its own architecture that reflects the visual semantics of the page.

Visual semantics describe all the repeating patterns in the design of the page. They represent the fundamental building blocks of your website. In fact, they are often portable across sites with only minor modifications. Visual semantics shouldn’t necessarily be tied to HTML semantics, because you want an architecture that fits the unique requirements of each layer of the stack…

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 for things like rounded corners. On the other hand, we also need to add structure to the language to make it easier for designers and developers to author new pages and applications. I hope the CSS Working Group will consider my suggestions.

Suggestions for the CSS Working Group

The community has been talking about some form of constants or variables in different incarnations for almost a decade, it is time to make this a reality. While it is possible to duplicate this functionality with a preprocessor (an excellent stop gap until browser support catches up), ultimately this is a tool which should live within the CSS itself. It is a powerful way of expressing more about the objects we are building.

The mixins and prototypes (and associated includes and extends properties) are designed to allow document authors to abstract reusable bits of code and better manage and maintain their style sheets. The goal is to mimic the effect of using multiple class names in the HTML without the drawbacks associated with current implementations. Authors need extends and include in order to write faster, smaller, more efficient style sheets.

CSS is a powerful expressive language. It needs certain modifications so that it will be robust, maintainable, and easy to implement.

From JSConf.eu

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 even has a few additions I’m excited about.

Down with Pseudocode!

On the other hand the spec itself drives me crazy because I feel like pseudocode is a poor substitute for properly and clearly stating what you are trying to achieve. It is easy to mask your agenda in pseudocode and harder for people to sort out later what was intentional versus incidental.

#html5 .pseudo-code { display: none;} Thought experiments don’t belong in a spec & pseudocode can’t replace properly specifying requirements.

@stubbornella

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 web applications.

Find out more about object oriented css

1. Open source project on github (GIT is having some DNS issues, be patient)
2. Follow along with the slides on slideshare
3. Join the OOCSS google group

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 of the objects is to place it in the HTML, there are no changes to other places in the DOM and no location dependent styling. Eases back-end development and makes it a lot easier to manage for newbies.
• Solution for sub-pixel rounding errors.

http://wiki.github.com/stubbornella/oocss

template.css and grids.css

…My prediction is that you’ll be writing complex layouts in less than 24 hours without adding a line to the CSS file.

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.

9 Best Practices

1. Create a component library of smart objects.
2. Use consistent semantic styles.
3. Design modules to be transparent on the inside.
4. Optimize images and sprites.
5. Avoid non-standard browser fonts.
6. Use columns rather than rows.
7. Choose your bling carefully.
8. Be flexible.
9. Learn to love grids.

Web Directions North, Denver, February 2-7

I’ll be speaking more about Design and also CSS best practices at Web Directions North in February where I’ve been invited to give both a Performance Bootcamp Workshop and a CSS Performance for Websites and Web Apps Presentation. I look forward to seeing you there!

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 œuvre. Forts de l’expérience de l’équipe performance de Yahoo!, à la fin de cette session vous saurez aborder la question des performances Web du point de vue du visiteur et mettre en œuvre les actions correctrices sur vos sites Web.

Je vais parler (en francais! eek!) avec Eric Daspet de la performance des images pour le web a ParisWeb. Les inscriptions pour Paris Web 2008 sont officiellement ouvertes. Jusqu’au 15 octobre au soir, vous bénéficierez de tarifs réduits. Le conference sera lieu a Paris le 13-15 Novembre. J’attend vous voir bientot alors.

Voila le proposition

Voulez-vous améliorer la vitesse de vos pages web et réduire l’impact écologique et monétaire de votre hébergement ? Voulez-vous faire ceci avec peu de changement de code et en gardant une belle interface graphique ? Cette session va vous apprendre les 7 étapes pour mettre votre site web au régime. Comment perdre des poids que votre site a pris en rajoutant les dernières nouveautés. Et, encore plus important, comment ne pas reprendre ce poids !

The Web Standards Curriculum published by Opera is a great place to start. It will give you the basics of Front-end Engineering from the ground up. The second wave of articles was recently published including a background image and sprites how-to by yours truly.

Time to board a plane, so I can’t tell you more just now, but check it out. It is a great place to get started or brush up on your understanding of web standards.

My Treo stopped syncing in January and I immediately started missing all my meetings. I need the device to ring every few seconds to remind me to blink and breathe, so life without a properly synced agenda was awful — just ask my colleagues. Guppy brain.

A Palm user for the past eight years, I made the switch to an iPhone 3G a few weeks ago. I’ve had one palm or another since I was gifted an S300 and became (shockingly) a productive member of society. I vaguely want to give the iPhone a fair shot, aware that my bias toward familiarity is inevitable, however there are a few things about the iPhone that totally and completely suck.

The YUI team released YUI3 for a sneak peek preview. The goals make me happy… especially goal 2.

1. lighter (less K-weight on the wire and on the page for most uses)
2. faster (fewer http requests, less code to write and compile, more efficient code)
3. more consistent (common naming, event signatures, and widget APIs throughout the library)
4. more powerful (do more with less implementation code)
5. more securable (safer and easier to expose to multiple developers working in the same environment; easier to run under systems like Caja or ADsafe)

Well, not quite. But I am pleased with the results. Who would have thought that the shy girl who almost failed a public speaking course at university would turn out to really enjoy presenting. Turns out I only like speaking about geeky things, preferably to geeks. A limitation perhaps, but far less limiting than nearly peeing myself with fear in college. No, not literally.

Anyway, check it out. It is jam packed with brand new performance ideas to make your site fly.

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.

Perhaps you have always wondered, what is Hillary Clintons YSlow score? Who is the master of image optimization, and who has so much image-bloat that it weighed more than Mike Huckabees entire page? Check out the article I wrote on YDN.

Happy voting.

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”, “save”, “email”, [...]