Child selectors are slower than more simple brethren. Is this true?

This is a affirmation that Jon Sykes sought out data for after he read the work of Jim Barraud.

His conclusion?

The skinny is that child selectors are a major performance issue.

This seemed to make sense, but to me I needed some sort of proof rather than just being told it’s that way by someone, so over the last two days I’ve tried two approaches to see if I can replicate the issue.

The first one was rather a half-assed idea that afterwards seems fundamentally flawed as a benchmark.

So I took a new approach which does seem to return some valid and rather interesting findings, particularly regarding Safari and Firefox 3 and how they react to child selectors and performance.

The tests show that there is slow down using child selectors over direct class name declarations in IE6, IE7 and Safari 3. Safari 3 being the most

impacted by child selectors. Firefox 2 has some impact, and Firefox 3 doesn’t seem to be impacted at all.

That said, this is a very extreme test, it is not often you’d have 20,000 class definitions in a single page or that all of them would use 4 levels of child selector.

Some developers said that .className may not render correctly compared to table tr td.className if you have 2 different rule sets. Since the second is more specific, it will take precedence.

What do you think? If this is true and I will have use more css classes.

According to a poll conducted by Webdesignerwall, just over 1 out of 10 people don’t think SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is mandatory as a designer; and what really is surprising, is that about 24% don’t even know what SEO is!

If you’re among the quarter of people who don’t know what SEO is or understand how it can help you, you should really read this article.

They write a SEO guide for designers who want to learn about making it easier for websites or blogs to be found by search engines. They explain the common mistakes made by designers and developers and provide some basic tips that you should be practicing to optimize your site for search engines.

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Denise Wilton, designer at Moo.com talks in a session for Future of Web Design London, about how to build web apps that not only work well, but have their own special character and personality.

As well as sharing tips from her design experience, Denise discusses the important role that copy plays in building a credible, web app too. She delivers some advice on making your web app seem more human, confident.

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and search bots doesn’t have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since search bots doesn’t currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while search bots can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

So what’s an honest web designer to do? Here are few practical suggestions:

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