Brad Frost:

The road towards better performance doesn’t start with developers or technology stacks (though I’m certainly not suggesting those things are unimportant). It begins with a shared interest on everyone’s part in making a product that’s lightning fast.

Performance is an aspect of design and should be treated as such from the beginning. It’s important that everyone involved in the process of making a website is on board with that and sees performance as an important and necessary part of the process and therefore the final product.

Mårten Björk:

The store uses uncompressed CSS files which offers us a glimpse of the front-end technology behind the revamp. Most notably, the Apple Store now makes heavy use of SASS to pre-process its CSS files. Somewhat strangely, Apple’s developers decided to ship the uncompressed, commented CSS in the final version.

Oh, uh, oh, that’s pretty bad.

The web is a rapidly evolving universe. An important part of our job as front-end developers is keeping up to date and staying close to new tools, trends and workflows.

Hundreds of blog posts and articles are published every day, but there is no way you can read all of them. We think you should have a strategy to keep up to date, so we have created this recipe.

A guide with ideas on how you can stay up to date with the latest trends, technologies and workflows.
Chris Coyier also just released his talk on the same topic as a screencast. You might wanna have a look at that as well.

Harry Roberts:

Global scope and poorly named variables are absolute programming basics; there is no reason for our CSS to have the same unpredictable and loose traits that developers spend so much time avoiding.

Harry Roberts explains quasi scope in CSS and how we can and should achieve it using the BEM methodology.
Never heard of BEM? I encourage you to read this article. You’ll love it as soon as you’ve understood it fully.

So that’s the interim report. Inaccessible and/ or single-engine, or JavaScript-dependant, or relying on server-side shenanigans. Images are central to the web; we need a declarative HTML method to achieve them in our multi-device world.

I’ve done my part in suggesting a strawman, and although cleverer minds than mine tell me it’s a bad solution, in a year and a half no-one has told me what a good one looks like.

Paul Irish:

As I understand it, Opera Mobile, Opera Desktop, and Opera Mini will all be based on Chromium. This means that they’ll not only share the exact version of Blink that Chrome uses, but also the same graphics stack, JavaScript engine, and networking stack. Already, Opera has contributed some great things to Blink and we’re excited about what’s next.

Interview with Paul Irish on all things “Blink”. Worth a read.

James Simonsen:

A 5% improvement may not seem like much by itself, but our estimates show that when you add up those saved seconds across all Chrome users, it totals to more than 510 years of people’s time saved every week.

Chrome added optimisations that make web pages load 5% faster on average. Chrome. \o/

Luke Wroblewski:

After 8 seconds, the carrier will cut off a connection so we want to load as much as possible when that initial connection is open.

This is Lukes summary of Scott Jehls talk at An Event Apart 2013 in San Diego. It’s all about performance: How to best deliver content, HTML, CSS, Javascript and images.

Jordan Moore:

I learned through my own experience that a font stack based on system fonts is no longer as safe as it was before the mobile device boom. Where system fonts in the major mobile operating systems are concerned, there is barely any consistency at all. For example, the Android operating system only comes packaged with 4 system fonts — none of which appear on iOS or Windows Phone, and those two platforms only share a handful of fonts between themselves. In the process of creating a compatibility table of shared default fonts across these systems for my own reference, what I ended up with was actually more like an incompatibility table. There is no safe native typographic foundation on today’s web.

Jordan Moore explores the possibilities of fallback fonts for mobile devices in a guest post on the Typekit blog.

Sadly I see a lot of websites loading massive amounts of webfont data when they don’t even need all of it. So make sure to only add fonts to your Typekit kits or Google webfonts that you really need.

Over and out, Performance-Martin.

Andy Hume:

Well, I’m unashamedly a web person. Long term, I’d bet on the web a million times over against one or two proprietary platforms with their vendor and hardware lock-in. Platforms like Android, iOS, Blackberry are of a time and place. That time is early 21st century and the place is mostly western, developed countries. The web has loftier goals than pushing the business interests of a bunch of large corporates.

Andy Hume, client-side architect for the Guardian, believes in the web in the long term.

When creating web pages, the only part of it that you can rely upon working is the HTML (and even that can fail, but without it there is no web page and everything else becomes moot). The attitude towards building for the web with this in mind is called progressive enhancement. Briefly, each extra layer (images, styling, behaviour, video, audio) of the page should be seen as optional. If you build pages with the idea that anything other than HTML that you add is optional, you will create a better and more robust web page.

In theory and in a perfect world this sounds great. But you know… that’s almost never the case in a real life project. (via)

Marissa Mayer:

We promise not to screw it up. [...]
The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.

Advertising that enhances user experience. I’m curious to see how this’ll turn out.