Considering Browser Reflow
Friday, April 5th, 2013
Back in February I attended the HTML5 Denver Users Group presentation – Making Your UI Scream (Not Your Users) by Wesley Hales. From the title of the presentation you can probably guess that his talk was about website performance. Most of what he had to say about performance, I’ve heard before, but one of the things that Wesley brought up was reflow. I’ve built plenty of websites and performance is always at the top of my list, but I never looked too much into reflow. This was my biggest takeaway from Wesley. Now that performance for mobile websites is a huge consideration, I’ve been interested in other micro-optimizations. Maybe another reason that I haven’t taken reflow into consideration before is because I follow one of Wesley’s rules: Don’t let micro-optimizations weigh you down. Finish the project first.
More On Reflow
Reflow is the process in which the browser calculates the positions and geometries of all the elements in the DOM tree for visual presentation. Reflow is a user-blocking browser operation that can effect the UX, and in this day-and-age of immediate gratification, performance is a very important UX consideration. One of the most powerful things about jQuery is it’s ability to easily manipulate the DOM with methods like .show(), .hide() and .attr(), but in order to minimize reflow you should avoid touching the DOM as much as possible.
Tags: CSS, JavaScript, Performance
Posted in Code, Development, jQuery, Mobile | No Comments »
DenverJS
Monday, January 7th, 2013
This month I attended a new meetup called DenverJS that focuses on, you probably guessed it, JavaScript. Being a client-side programmer in Denver, I’m really excited about this one! In this post, I want to briefly review the 2013 kickoff session at Galvanize.
What about DenverJS?
Straight from their meetup profile:
Focused on developing the Javascript community along the Front Range! We welcome any and all interested in Javascript and related technologies. We will be weighted towards node.js and server-side topics to balance out the already awesome Denver HTML5 group.
Tags: Devner, HTML5, JavaScript
Posted in Code, Development, Miscellaneous | No Comments »