🧵 Two of my most- and first-used checks when doing a performance audit are surprisingly old school: 1) Validate HTML 2) Disable JS.

Validate HTML? Yep. We haven’t really cared about ‘valid HTML’ for valid HTML’s sake for about a decade, but certain errors can actually be pretty significant. What’s wrong with this picture?
It’s this lil’ fella right here. isn’t allowed in the , so when the browser encounters the , it assumes the should have been closed already.
This is a feature. This is what allows us to omit certain closing tags like

, , , and—you guessed it!—. The appearance of certain opening tags implies the closing of certain preceding ones.
The practical upshot of which is that non- elements early-terminate the tags, pushing all of your important resources into the . Oops!
Disable JavaScript? I think building sites for people who’ve turned JS off is an expensive waste of time: they’ve turned it off! Leave them to it. But! I do feel it’s vital that we can fail reasonably elegantly when JS fails (and it will).
I strongly hold @adactio and @jaffathecake’s respective (and paraphrased) opinions about JS: ‘How well does it fail?’ and ‘All your users are non-JS until your JS is downloaded and run’.
From a performance perspective, I don’t want to see your core content buried away in JS. JS is slower than HTML. If you need JS to display core content, you’re on the slow path. The quickest way for me to ascertain whether content is coming out of JS? Disable it!
Do I care that CNN doesn’t work with JS disabled? Not necessarily. But immediately I can see that their content is reliant on the successful download and execution of JS. This is always going to be slower than having it in the HTML—the first (and successful) response.

More from Tech

"I really want to break into Product Management"

make products.

"If only someone would tell me how I can get a startup to notice me."

Make Products.

"I guess it's impossible and I'll never break into the industry."

MAKE PRODUCTS.

Courtesy of @edbrisson's wonderful thread on breaking into comics –
https://t.co/TgNblNSCBj – here is why the same applies to Product Management, too.


There is no better way of learning the craft of product, or proving your potential to employers, than just doing it.

You do not need anybody's permission. We don't have diplomas, nor doctorates. We can barely agree on a single standard of what a Product Manager is supposed to do.

But – there is at least one blindingly obvious industry consensus – a Product Manager makes Products.

And they don't need to be kept at the exact right temperature, given endless resource, or carefully protected in order to do this.

They find their own way.
On Wednesday, The New York Times published a blockbuster report on the failures of Facebook’s management team during the past three years. It's.... not flattering, to say the least. Here are six follow-up questions that merit more investigation. 1/

1) During the past year, most of the anger at Facebook has been directed at Mark Zuckerberg. The question now is whether Sheryl Sandberg, the executive charged with solving Facebook’s hardest problems, has caused a few too many of her own. 2/
https://t.co/DTsc3g0hQf


2) One of the juiciest sentences in @nytimes’ piece involves a research group called Definers Public Affairs, which Facebook hired to look into the funding of the company’s opposition. What other tech company was paying Definers to smear Apple? 3/ https://t.co/DTsc3g0hQf


3) The leadership of the Democratic Party has, generally, supported Facebook over the years. But as public opinion turns against the company, prominent Democrats have started to turn, too. What will that relationship look like now? 4/

4) According to the @nytimes, Facebook worked to paint its critics as anti-Semitic, while simultaneously working to spread the idea that George Soros was supporting its critics—a classic tactic of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. What exactly were they trying to do there? 5/

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