Learning the World

A while ago I wrote about using CSS Sprites in img tags — Foreground Sprites. Thus you avoid HTTP requests, but the page turns really ugly when CSS is switched off because the sprite image will be displayed in its full size. Now Google’s accessibility specialist T.V. Raman explained their idea of using sprites for foreground images — a much better solution!

Nate Koechley presented the research results of the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Team two weeks ago in London. The traditional focus of performance optimization has been on the backend, i.e. system efficiency. But comparing a number of high profile websites, the Yahoo! team found that frontend performance is responsible for 80-98% of the perceived response time. Therefore doubling the frontend performance gains more than doubling the backend performance. […]

In the last six months I became more aware of techniques for optimizing website performance. I learned about memory leaks and JavaScript performance, but what impressed me most was Nate Koechley’s presentation about large scale website performance issues in “Yahoo! vs. Yahoo!” at the @media conference 2006. In the meantime there have been more blog posts about particular aspects of performance optimization, so I wrote a summary. […]