Nicole Sullivan | Web Directions East

Nicole Sullivan

Nicole is an evangelist, front-end performance consultant, CSS Ninja, and author. She started the Object-Oriented CSS open source project, which answers the question: how do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? She also consulted with the W3C for their beta redesign, and is the co-creator of Smush.it, an image optimization service in the cloud. She is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for large commercial websites. Nicole speaks about performance at conferences around the world, most recently at The Ajax Experience, ParisWeb, and Web Directions North.

Speech: CSS Performance for Fast Web Applications

CSS is a powerful, beautiful, and expressive language, but deeply misunderstood and often poorly written. Now is exactly the right moment for it to get a dose of software engineering best practices to allow you to write fast, maintainable, standards-based front-end code. You will learn how to add much needed predictability to CSS so that even beginners can create beautiful websites.

In this session, Nicole will demonstrate how to build flexible templates. After attending, you will be able to:

• Apply programming best practices to style sheets
• Understand the cascade
• Architect fast, accessible sites that scale to enterprise level
• Avoid unnecessary reflows

Workshop: Introduction to Website Performance

Users love fast websites, but they expect all of the functionality of a desktop application. In this workshop, Nicole will explain the latest techniques, research, and best practices from companies like Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and AOL. You will learn practical techniques that you can implement at your own company which cause dramatic improvement in response times. [→Workshop info]

Website: Stubbornella

Tool: Smush.it

Amazing free image compression tool, now offered as part of YSlow.

Video: High Performance Websites—Nicole Sullivan

Books

• Even Faster Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers

Slides

Design Fast Websites

Object Oriented CSS

View more presentations from Nicole Sullivan.

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