Rendering: repaint, reflow/relayout, restyle
Some insight into how browser rendering engines work. The article shows how the way you manipulate styles (and the DOM) can affect rendering performance by forcing the browser to re-paint large portions of the screens, or re-calculate the dimensions of a large subtree of DOM nodes.
Related cards:
Improving browser rendering performance
As the web is being used for more and more tasks, expectations rise. Not only should web pages offer rich interaction, they must be responsive in both size and interaction.
This imposes a paradoxon that needs to be solved by building performing a...
Improve web font rendering in Windows by autohinting fonts
Web fonts are awesome. After being restricted to Arial for two decades there is finally a cross-browser way to embed fonts into web pages.
Unfortunately while web fonts look awesome on Linux and MacOS, they [look h...
Enabling view rendering for controller specs
Views are normally (for good reason) not rendered in controller specs. If you need it to happen, use:
RSpec 1 (Rails 2):
[integrate_views](http://rspec.rubyforge.org/rspec-rails/1.2.6/classes/Spec/Rails/Example/ControllerExampleGroup.html#...
Defining "partials" in pure HTML without additional rendering helpers
A while ago I tweeted a thread about how a small JavaScript snippet, one that can fit in a single tweet in fact, can be used to allow defining custom elements purely in HTML. This post will expand on the idea, show how the snippet works, and arg...
Fix errors when rendering PDF output
If you run specs or your application and get an error like:
ActionController::MissingFile in 'ProductsController#show, should render PDF'
Cannot read file /some/file.pdf
You may be missing the HTMLDOC binary on ...
Cheats to optimize your web font rendering
Type looking a little flabby? Overweight? Want to give it a kick in the pants? Take a look at some of these tricks to really give your web type a workout.
Rendering a custom 404 page in Rails 2
Simple: Tell the application controller how to handle exceptions, here a RecordNotFound error.
Do this with the following line:
# application_controller.rb
rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, :with => :render_404
This will ...
Test your CSS rendering output with GreenOnion
No one wants to cry over regression issues in views; does testing HTML and CSS have to be such a back and forth between designers and devs? Why is it that the rest of the stack can have TDD and BDD but not the presentation layer? Well, GreenOnion ...
Web font rendering on Macs
Macs render fonts bolder than they are, especially on dark background. This can be fixed by configuring the font smoothing:
body
-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased
-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale
You should do this on every proje...
Rendering 404s for missing images via Rails routes
When you load a dump for development, records may reference images that are not available on your machine.
Requests to those images may end up on your application, e.g. if a catch-all route is defined that leads to a controller doing some heavy l...