It's a wonderful sunny Saturday outside yet I'm here bloging about web development. I should see a doctor, but in the meantime please suffer my brain dump about things browser related.
I'm not really a front end developer, in the sense that I have very poor graphic design skills, that my knowledge of Javascript and CSS is limited. However over the time I had my fair bit of front end development, more recently here, not counting the things I do for fun, so yeah, I don't have expert level knowledge about all of this, but I feel I have enough experience to broadly think about some general guidelines about what should be fed to the browsers. So the goal of this post is not to dictate what I think is right, but rather to put some ideas on the table and calling for critics and alternative and/or improvement suggestion. So if you're a JS Ninja, or a CSS old-master, please be indulgent, and share your art in the comment.
Ok let's get started with the general page structure. I like a page source to be clean and organised (not like my bedroom), but also the goal here is to allow the browser to render the page as soon as possible. In other words, to reduce the time to first pixel:
<html>
<head>
<title>My Wonderful Page</title>
<meta name="description" content="Some meaningful and reasonably long description">
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/head.js"></script>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="/one/css/file.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div>
All sorts of HTML stuff.
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
head.js('https://ajax.googleapis.com/.../jquery.min.js',
'https://ajax.googleapis.com/../jquery-ui.min.js',
'http://mysite.com/js/site.js'
);
head.ready(function(){
installFancyJS($(document));
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
Let's go though this step by step.
Use a JS Loader. So the idea here is to do as little as possible in the header, and deport the heavy lifting to the end of the body. In your header, you should have only one and only one minimal script, and this script should allow you to load things later at your page bottom. Here I use head.js. It's got other fancy base features but load.js is also a good alternative if you like to make it even smaller. Let your page be pear shaped.
One CSS File. Not two, not three. One, and preferably on the same domain as your main site (so relative URLs are welcome here). Why is that? Here we reduce the number of extra requests the browser has to do to a minimum of erm ... one, and by having the CSS hosted on the same hostname, you avoid doing extra DNS queries, saving you precious milliseconds. Some people even argue that you should have your CSS in the page itself. I'm not sure about this one. It's true that it saves you the extra query entirely, but at the same time, your page is now heavier and therefore longer to download. There's probably a reasonable limit under which this actually saves time, but I'm not sure about its value. Of course in the development environment, you probably want to have your css neatly organized, so you don't have a giant ball of spaghetti monster to deal with. I've tried different techniques to achieve that, but didn't come with something I really like yet. Suggestions?
All sorts of HTML Stuff. Warning. Controversial bit. What? HTML stuff, controversial? Well yes, as it seems to me that with the advent of the uber-ubiquitous Ajax coolness, a large amount of people chose to ignore a fundamental fact of life (at least of life as a developer): Browsers were born to render HTML and dynamic web servers can generate HTML. For instance, I know a site where every time they need to display a table of something (let's say historical stock prices), they first display an empty table, and then, when all the page JavaScript is loaded, they make a second query to get the data to populate the table. It drives me mad. Not only I don't see the point* , but more importantly, you can imagine how it kills the 'time to useful pixel' of their pages. It's not that I'm against Ajax. not at all. I love it, I was doing it wayyyy before jQuery became popular. In fact you'll find here some posts I wrote about how to easily 'ajax' anything. But I kind of believe that if you want to do JS object models and get JSON from the server instead of HTML, you'll be much better off developing your backend as an API and generate your GUI using something like flex, or GWTK (please add yours to the list :)). I certainly reckon the incredible value and power of OO JS/Json for complex and specific information manipulation and display (down with flash and applets!!), but for general pages development, I prefer to stick with good old HTML, specially if the application is 'browsing' oriented.
One JS Function that does it all. I call it (observe my creative naming skills) 'installFancyJS', and it takes one argument: the jQuery** context it's going to used in. So what does this function do? Well, it installs callbacks and all sort of responsive code in the page just after it's loaded. More precisely in the given context. To give you a very minimal example:
function installFancyJS(context){
installTopClick(context);
....
}
function installTopClick(context){
$('div#topbar' , context).on('click', function(ev){
$('html,body').animate({scrollTop: 0 },
{ duration: 'slow', easing: 'swing'}
);
});
}
The reason why I propagate the context everywhere is that when I get a new bit of HTML using Ajax, I want to be able to install the full set of Javascript features on the newly created slice of document. In here's an minimal example of Ajax callback that uses the function:
function(data){
var newbit = $(data);
container.replaceWith(newbit);
// install fancy js on the container's new content.
installFancyJS(container);
}
That's is for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this and found some interesting/ridiculous/horrible things to talk about.
Jerome.
* But I see the reason: they got tied to the horrible datatables.net.
**yes I use jQuery, please rant and suggest in the comments if you know a better one.
