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Showing posts from October, 2011

Progressive Enhancement For a Faster Site

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This is a cross post from the Wayfair Engineering Blog Progressive Enhancement is often described as an alternate approach to “Graceful Degradation” – it encourages focusing on the most basic functionality first and then building out from there.  It also forms the core of the Yahoo! Graded Browser Support model, which we use as a guide for our own rules around browser support.  This is an important topic, but it has been covered fairly extensively in other articles , so I’m not going to dive into it too much here.  Instead I am going to talk about specific progressive enhancement techniques we use at Wayfair to improve site performance. As you may know, there are some amazing new features in HTML5/CSS3 that make web development easier – rounded corners, drop shadows, gradients, placeholders in text fields, in browser form validation, etc., all of which reduce dependency on background images and JavaScript.  These are great features to have, but what about your IE 6

Switching from Classic ASP to PHP

This is a cross post from the Wayfair Engineering Blog One of the big changes at Wayfair recently was moving all of our storefront code (well, almost all…we’re still working on our sessioned code) from Classic ASP (VBScript) to PHP.  The company was started in 2002 and at that time ASP was a common technology on the web, and one that our founders were familiar with.  After 8 years of working with it, we had pushed it to the limits and decided we’d get more benefit out of moving to a new technology. Motivation for Switching While ASP is still in extended support, as a language it hasn’t been actively developed for a number of years (I tried to find out exactly how many years, but my Google searches were fruitless, which might tell you something).  It’s also a proprietary Microsoft language, so we were unable to make modifications ourselves, so any bugs we found were not getting fixed.  ASP’s age also means that there are very few companies using it, so the community