Raible Designs

[OSCON 2008] Even Faster Web Sites by Steve Souders

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. To begin his talk, Steve is running YSlow in "autorun" mode. This runs YSlow Performance tests on the top 100 sites according to Alexa. Before Google, Steve was at Yahoo for 7 years. You can download Steve's slides from his site (don't ask me where).

iGoogle with an empty cache: 9% of the time is spent getting the HTML document. The % of time of what a webserver does is a pretty small percentage of the overall picture. If the cache is primed, the time goes up to 17% of the time.

80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend. Start there.

There's a greater potential of improvement on the frontend. If you improve the backend performance by 50%, chances are the end-user only sees a 5% improvement.

The 14 Rules are encapsulated in the YSlow plugin. At OSCON last year, Yahoo released YSlow. 500,000 downloads since it was released. Following the release of YSlow, Steve wrote High Performance Web Sites.

High Performance Web Sites, Vol 2. The 3 most important rules are:

• Split the initial payload
• Load scripts without blocking
• Don't scatter inline scripts

Why focus on JavaScript? A lot of the top sites use JavaScript. For example, up until a few weeks ago, Facebook served up 1MB of JavaScript, uncompressed. Scripts block parallel downloads and page rendering. To see it in action, go to http://stevesouders.com/cuzillion/?ex=10008.

Any content below a <script> is blocked from rendering - even if it's already cached in the browser. Cuzillion is an open source project that Steve is releasing that allows you to add components to a page and test their performance.

Split your JavaScript between what's needed to render the page and everything else. Load "everything else" after the page is rendered. To do this, you can use Firebug to do it manually, or you can use Doloto from Microsoft to automate the splitting of your files.

MSN.com solves the script blocking problem by using JS DOM to allow for parallel downloading. There's 6 techniques for doing this:

• XHR Eval (must have same domain as page)
• XHR Injection (same domain)
• Script in iFrame (same domain)
• Script DOM Element (domains can differ)
• Script Defer (only supported in IE, domains can differ)
• document.write (not recommended, parallelization only works in IE)

How do these techniques cause "browser busy" indicators? XHR Eval and Injection don't trigger any indicators. You need to choose when you want to show busy indicators. It's good to show them when you want to show your users that something is processing (but not for lazy-loading JavaScript that's not required for load). For the different techniques, most don't ensure order of parsing.

Based on 3 factors, Steve can tell you which technique is best to use. These three factors are 1) the URL of the page and script 2) if you want busy indicators and 3) if you care about order. Steve thinks it would be awesome if web frameworks could support this to write out JavaScript appropriately for the developer's input.

Long executing inline scripts block rendering and downloads. If you know you're going to have scripts like this, you can solve it with a couple workarounds:

• Initiate execution with setTimeout(>250 for Firefox)
• Move JavaScript to enternal script with advanced downloading techniques
• Use defer attribute for IE

In Firefox 2, stylesheets block parallel downloads just like scripts. IE doesn't. However, IE will block when you have a stylesheet followed by an inline script. To solve, it's best to move line scripts above stylesheets or below other resources. use <link>, not @import.

Takeaways: focus on the frontend, run YSlow, focus on JavaScript (split initial payload, load scripts w/o blocking, don't scatter inline scripts).

Three Announcements:

• HTTPWatch for Firefox (not public yet, not free).
• Firebug Light 1.2 (can be used with IE or Opera).
• Mozilla is Firebuggin' (Mozilla is dedicating 3 people to work on Firebug).

[OSCON 2008] CSS for High Performance JavaScript UI by Gavin Doughtie

Gavin is a front end developer on Google’s Picasa Web Albums and a contributor to the dojo toolkit. The original designer tools for Web 1.0 were the FONT tag, TABLE hacks and spacer gifs. Now we live in the future (shows a picture of the iPhone). Maybe it's time to accept that we're stuck with CSS. "I'm a coder, not a designer" is what happens at OSCON.

There are costs of JavaScript: development, download, parse time and runtime performance. It's extremely powerful and high-level, but it's slow because it's interpreted. Drawing a box with JavaScript in Firefox 3 isn't too difficult. Another way to do the same thing is with CSS. Doing the same thing in CSS is much faster and requires less code. Surrender To Win. You don't have to code it all. You can hand off part of that to your runtime environment (browser).

CSS Fundamentals
You want to how things flow in a page. Browsers were originally designed to render text. They're built to render flowing text. Other important fundamentals include float, positioning, negative margins, relative units, pseudo-selectors. Lastly, you need to know when to use tables. Gavin is now showing an example of using CSS to modify an image so it scales with the browser window. It's pretty simple:

body {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  height: 100%;
  width: 100%;
  overflow: hidden;
}

img { 
  position: relative;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
}

Relatively Absolutely: "Absolute" in relative to position:relative. If an element has absolute positioning, it will only be positioned relative to it's parent element. To draw a box on an image, it's usually best to calculate the percentage position and sizes in script or on the server. The world's greatest psuedo-selector is :hover. Unfortunately, :hover doesn't work on anything but <a> in IE 6.

With floats, you can "float" elements to the top, right, bottom and left. In Firefox and Safari, you can set a border-radius to draw lines that are curved. Before Firefox 3, these lines where terrible looking.

Tables make a lot of sense when you have a grid layout. Use table-layout:fixed if you don't want table cells to be the width of their contents.

For sizing images and other elements, it's usually best to use em for the height and width and relative measurements. You can then use style.fontSize to resize the images. Using this technique is must faster than using JavaScript to set the height and width on an image.

WebKit, the CSS Wonderland. Gavin loves WebKit. It's on Safari (Windows, OS X and iPhone), Android, GNOME and KDE. With WebKit, you can build expanding lists w/o any coding. To do gradients in WebKit, you use:

background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#fff), to(#00abeb));
-webkit-border-radius: 0.24em;

To do animation, you can use:

-webkit-transition-property: width, height;
-webkit-transition-duration: 250ms;
-webkit-transition-timing-function: default;

Another thing you can do with WebKit is rotate images (using -webkit-transform: rotate()) and just about anything (divs, forms, etc.). WebKit also supports SVN masks, which means you can open up a hole and view an image through it.

Gecko's pretty cool too. Firefox 3 introduced a new rendering engine based on Cairo. You can do an SVG transform in Firefox 3 to create reflections of elements (divs) in your page.

"With browsers, you cut people off at the knees, but everyone's the same height." -- Alex Russell

IE 6 is not the problem, we're the problem. If you drop support for IE 6, you won't have to worry about coding towards it. It might not be possible if you work for a large company, but if you're small, you should definitely think about it hard.

It's funny to think that IE 6 is the new Netscape 4.

Gavin's slides from this talk will be available at http://xdraw.org/oscon2008.html in the next few days.

Shadowbox - a slick Lightbox that supports Flash

Via Ajaxian, I learned about Shadowbox.js. From its creator, Michael Jackson:

A few weeks ago, I was looking for a Lightbox-like script that would allow me to display more than just pictures. In addition to static images, my client required the ability to display various types of movies including QuickTime and SWF. The only script that fit the bill was Lightwindow?a nice piece of work to be sure?but it required the Prototype + Scriptaculous combo and I was already using YUI.

Besides, I thought, it would be really great to have a full-featured media viewing application that was library agnostic. Then, if I need to use a different framework for some particular reason, I can easily switch.

Thus was born Shadowbox?a cross-browser, cross-platform, cleanly-coded and fully-documented media viewer application built entirely in JavaScript.

I've been using Lightbox JS on this site for almost 2 years. The next time I need lightbox functionality for an application, I'll definitely try out Shadowbox. I dig the look and feel. I agree with Ajaxian commentors that rel="lightbox[name]" would be awesome. If it's added, I could theoretically replace lightbox.js with shadowbox.js and I wouldn't have to make any other changes.

View Shadowbox Demos »

Ext JS Tag Library

James Carr in Making extJS More Accessible to Java Developers:

With my recent interest in extjs, I was playing with the idea of making a Struts2/WebWork component library or a tag library to handle a lot of the boilerplate extjs code (i.e. creating layouts and such) but, luckily, discovered someone beat me to the punch!

I randomly came across ExtTLD this morning while sifting through my rss feeds, and I must say I am rather impressed. Although I consider myself a pretty good javascript developer, there seems to be a lot of java developers who aren?t that hot at javascript... which is why whenever I attend any java related conference there is always several sessions touting "javascript free ajax!" frameworks like GWT, Ajax4JSF, or IceFaces. Although I've always been skeptical of such frameworks, I do see their benefits... especially for the java developer who excels at serverside JEE development but generally sucks when it comes to adding javascript behavior to the presentation layer.

I can definitely see how Ajax-with-IDE-code-completion would appeal to many developers. However, I do have to agree with James:

So far it looks good, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. Basically, I'll have to see if it passes my "good javascript generator framework" test. I?m a pretty staunch advocate of unobtrusive javascript, and generally hate any presentation layer framework that seeks to dump several hundred (or thousand) lines of javascript inline in the html document.

For development shops that have UI-only developers for the front-end and Java developers for the controller/validation part of an application, frameworks that generate JavaScript usually don't make sense.

ExtTLD's license:

ExtTLD is published under GPL 3.0 license however restricts use by companies participating in animal abuse, such as animal testing laboratories etc.