This is part 2 of a series of technical posts documenting some of the interesting work and technologies we’ve used to power the new interface (see also part 1, Instant notifications of new emails via eventsource/server-sent events). Regular users can skip these posts, but we hope technical users find them interesting.As dynamic websites constructed entirely on the client side become de rigueur, there are a number of templating languages battling it out to become the One True Way™ of rendering your page. All follow essentially the same style: introduce extra control tags to intersp...

Yesterday I did a workshop at Google Ventures for some of their portfolio companies. I didn’t know how much performance background the audience would have, so I did an overview of everything performance-related starting with my first presentations back in 2007. It was very nostalgic. It has been years since I talked about the best practices from High Performance Web Sites. I reviewed some of those early tips, like Make Fewer HTTP Requests, Add an Expires Header, and Gzip Components.But I needed to go back even further. Thinking back to before Velocity and WPO existed, I thought I might ...

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this century to enable us to take advantage of these new capabilities.We're optimized for "Yesterday's Web"Modern...

“Techmeme has redesigned,” Gabe Rivera founder of the popular technology news site wrote in January 2012. “Drudge Report is now indisputably the web’s ugliest news site.”I use Techmeme all the time. I find it an excellent news website. It’s a collection of well-selected links to important issues in the technology industry. It doesn’t look pretty but it works fine for me. Asides from the quality of its stories it also has black text on white background and a fairly large size, legible font. Gabe Rivera claims that Drudge Report is “the webâ€...

Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design “My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality”  â€“ Dieter RamsSince I got to know the work of Dieter Rams back in college, I became fascinated by the exceptional pro...

So let's say you're an awesome web developer making an awesome web app. One day, you add a link in the web app that has an event handler instead of an href. Testing it, you realize that your cursor doesn't change when hovering over it, unlike a normal link. You think for a minute and then give it a cursor:pointer style, which fixes the issue. You are happy.The next day, QA informs you that the link cannot be tabbed to. Confused, you do some research and find a solution to the problem: Simply set the tabindex attribute to 0, which correctly adds the link into the tab flow. You are annoyed by th...

Great web design is hard.  It requires imagination, a keen eye, and the ability to project ideas onto a, generally digital, medium.  In today’s world this calls for a conflation of both artist and technologist.  I am not one of these people. I am a technologist, but I am no artist (thankfully I know some great artists!).Nonetheless, I’ve always had a good eye for things that look good and for sites that look like they were built with an early version of Microsoft FrontPage <yuck!>.  Futhermore, there are several aspects of design that I consider low-hang...

Takeaway: Ryan Boudreaux looks at some of the latest reports on how users are spending their time on the web. Keeping an eye on trends is one way for web developers to stay current.Recent figures in Internet activity include several interesting trends, including:the number of smartphone-user adoption ratesCyber Monday sales figuresmobile banking app usagesocial networking on mobile social mediahours spent onlinesearch habitsTrends in worldwide Internet activity may or may not translate well into changes and updates to an organization’s web development and design plans. As a result, many...