I thought it might be useful to share some techniques I’ve started to adopt when building a website’s CSS. These range from reducing the number of requests to keeping it easy to develop for multiple browsers.
Performance topics:
Technique 1:
First know, your CSS less is always better. For example, a lot of times I find myself writing:
margin-left:0px;
margin-right:10px;
margin-top:5px;
margin-bottom:8px;
This can be converted to:
margin: 0px 10px 5px 8px; /* top, left, bottom, right */
Doing this can reduce the size of your CSS file, making it load faster.
Read more…
Software CSS, IE, IE6, Performance, zoom:1
I’ve been doing a little work on mongrel-esi to improve it’s concurrency. Here’s a little test script I wrote to verify some of my thinking. The tricky part, is keeping all the bytes in the correct order, while still requesting as much as possible in parallel. Here’s my thinking at the moment.
Read more…
Software ESI, mongrel, Performance, Ruby, Threads
“Here’s the problem: Internet Explorer forgets to look into its own cache when inserting HTML via JavaScript DOM manipulation (read: if you use img tags or any tags with CSS background images, Internet Explorer will always try to redownload these images). Read the detailed account on this.
Microsoft says it’s designed that way. Well, Sure.
“There’s an other bug in Intenet Explorer (unrelated?) that causes caching of images in CSS only happen with relative paths, so never use background-image:url(/images/blah.png) but do a background-image:url(../images/blah.png), relative to the path your CSS file is in.”
It’s an older article, but hopefully has a little of something for everyone. –> Speaking loudly against IE is only in our interest as consumers and users of the web! 
Update: More details about IE caching bug can be found here: http://www.ahinea.com/en/tech/ie-dhtml-image-caching.html
Software Caching, IE6, Performance
Recent Comments