Nolan @nolan@toot.cafe

New blog post: "Introducing Pinafore for Mastodon" https://nolanlawson.com/2018/04/09/introducing-pinafore-for-mastodon/

"The current state of web design" http://fczbkk.com/current-state-of-webdesign/

Actual thing I wrote in an email today: "Your metrics reporting library is adding 6 seconds to your page load." 🤢

Interesting post from Firefox folks on how they sped up rendering using retained display lists: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/06/retained-display-lists/

Compare with Edge's Independent Rendering, and the concepts are pretty similar (dates back to IE 11 BTW 😉) https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/08/17/making-web-smoother-independent-rendering/

As a browser perf guy, I've seen some shit:

- web pages that continually peg a CPU core at 100% even after loaded (not cryptocurrency mining, just poor code)
- a web page that allocates 1GB of memory, frees it, and then repeats ~15 times
- a web page that loads >20MB of JS and then they wonder why their site is slow
- a web page creating >30,000 DOM nodes and they wonder why it's slow
- a web page where every "component" is an iframe and they wonder why it's slow

The web is wild.

As for the user experience of Svelte, I really enjoyed it even beyond the perf benefits or the space-age feeling of having a framework compile my code for me. It's similar to Vue in that you have computations and watchers, and that you write single-file components.

I also found that Svelte "got out of my way" and let me write vanilla JS code whenever I wanted to. Compared to something like React, I found Svelte was both 1) easier to learn, and 2) felt less like I was writing "framework code."

@rich_harris did a great job explaining the concepts behind SvelteJS at JSConf EU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqt6YxAZoOc).

I saw the same Jed Schmidt talk he mentions, and it really was enlightening to realize that a web app is conceptually a directed graph but the DOM is a tree, and this is why it's so hard for JS frameworks to get the abstraction right. But if your JS framework is a compiler, then that means you can describe your app as a graph and the framework can generate the tree.

Gotta say I really enjoy SvelteJS and the promise of "disappearing frameworks." https://toot.cafe/@peter/100243209978458086 (via @peter)

Interesting look into Paisley Park and Prince's legacy: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/25/paisley-park-princes-lonely-palace

If you're into Henry VIII stuff (or just watched "The Tudors"), this is a hilariously good portrait of Anne Boleyn: https://longreads.com/2018/05/25/queens-of-infamy-anne-boleyn/

If you like Liz Phair, this is a good read: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a21346007/liz-phair-girly-sound-to-guyville/