Testing CSS Performance

Written on May 14th, 2008, by Cristian

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.

If a programming language was a boat …

Written on April 19th, 2008, by Cristian

ast week a friend of mine forward me a post in which the development language was compared to a boat. It was inspired by a recent forum post, and has lot of fun so I decide to share.

Read the rest of this entry »

2008 Logo Design Trends

Written on February 29th, 2008, by Cristian

10 trends that will define logo design in 2008

Logos are the ultimate mark of distinction and everyone loves them. We see logos everyday - on the highways, on consumer goods, on the Web and in the institutions and organizations we support. Read about the different types of logo designs and learn what principles and techniques are used to create them.

Discover what the future holds for logo design!

LinkedIn Re-Designed

Written on February 28th, 2008, by Cristian

Today I notice that LinkedIn has roll out a new site-wide design featuring a tab-less header and a persistent left column with personal, account-related options.

LinkedIn has also add status updates with which users can broadcast their current activities (professional or otherwise) to their connections and/or networks.

The new design has a similar layout to Facebook’s, with the page divide into a header, a thin left column and a wide right column. The homepage will also have modules that you’ll be able to drag around to reorder.

I personaly don’t like it. They could bring something more professional, original. For some reason, the focus of the site is all over the place.

CandesProjects Re-Launched!

Written on January 15th, 2008, by Cristian

Candesprojects has finally re-launched, and about time! This blog will be an online source for topics ranging from XHTML/CSS, development tips, SEO, usability, advertising, and good stuff form the web that gets my interests. This site will act as my personal blog to write about my upcoming online projects. It will also function as my portfolio.

I would love to get some comments on the new design and usability, as I’m very pleased with how it’s looking. Please check back soon for updates, and don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed!

I’ll post with some real content very soon.