Notes from Kyle Neath’s presentation at Twitter on 5/31

  • Slides http://warpspire.com/talks/responsive/
  • hashbang urls
    • are a kludgy workaround for lack of history api. Since history api is coming, they have no future. Since urls are forever, especially w/ tweets being stored in the lib of congress, use of hashbangs results in permanent support for a temporary condition.
    • break pre-existing url fragment behavior
    • result in confusing routing logic
  • “responsive web design” is adapting to client and seeming responsive to user input
    • page load isn’t just a benchmark; a page is only “loaded” when the user can scroll, read text, and click links
  • well-designed urls provide a command-line-like interface for web apps
  • all web assets should have a url, i.e., navigation should not allow access to a resource that cannot then be accessed directly via a url
  • native elements should behave as the user expects
    • do not modify common key combos, e.g., shift + click
    • take advantage of the back button, tabs, links, etc
  • responsiveness is as much about performance as perception
    • wait ~500ms before showing loader image; showing loaders immediately can actually make the page seem slower
  • ssl
    • is required now that there are common, easy ways to sniff credentials
    • a new ssl handshake is very slow, and required for each domain
    • use http keep-alive to reuse ssl connections
    • multiple parallel requests to a new domain will each have to perform a handshake; instead, complete one fast request, and then reuse the connection for subsequent parallel requests
    • github optimized its backend to 40ms latency before realizing that the ssl handshake takes 500ms
      • a case of perception > performance
      • favor science over theory, i.e., test time-to-usable in multiple regions instead of just running perf tests on components
    • templates
    • use something simple, e.g., mustache
    • avoid rendering on client and server; pick one
    • kneath prefers server-side
    • for server-side rendering, passing html back as one value in a json object allows for passing data back in other keys
  • html 5 history api
  • allows for much richer state management. See github’s new issues dashboard

3 thoughts on “Notes from Kyle Neath’s presentation at Twitter on 5/31”

  1. Hi Erik,

    Gr8 post.. thanks for sharing and helping the twitter developers community to feel part of the big changes in Twitter..

    Pls keep us posted 🙂

    10x for sharing,
    Sharel

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