It’s not often as a Web performance consulatant and analyst that I find a book that is useful to so many clients. It’s much more rare to discover a book that can help most Web sites improve their response times and consistency in fewer than 140 pages.

Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites (O’Reilly, 2007 - Companion Site) captures the essence of one-side of the Web performance problem succinctly and efficiently, delivering a strong message to a group he classifies as front-end engineers. It is written in a way that can be understood by marketing, line-of-business, and technical teams. It is written in a manner designed to provoke discussions within an organization with the ultimate goal of improving Web performance

Once these discussion have started, there may some shock withing these very organizations. Not only with the ease with which these rules can be implemented, but by the realization that the fourteen rules in this book will only take you so far.

The 14 Rules

Web performance, in Souders’ world, can be greatly improved by applying his fourteen Web performance rules. For the record, the rules are:

Rule 1 - Make Fewer HTTP Requests
Rule 2 - Use a Content Delivery Network
Rule 3 - Add an Expires Header
Rule 4 - Gzip Components
Rule 5 - Put Stylesheets at the Top
Rule 6 - Put Scripts at the Bottom
Rule 7 - Avoid CSS Expressions
Rule 8 - Make JavaScript and CSS External
Rule 9 - Reduce DNS Lookups
Rule 10 - Minify JavaScript
Rule 11 - Avoid Redirects
Rule 12 - Remove Duplicate Scripts
Rule 13 - Configure ETags
Rule 14 - Make AJAX Cacheable

From the Companion Site [here]

These rules seem simple enough. And, in fact, most of them are easy to understand, and, in an increasingly complex technical world, easy to implement. In fact, the most fascinating thing about the lessons in this book, for the people who think about these things everyday, is that they are pieces of basic knowledge, tribal wisdom, that have been passed down for as long as the Web has existed.

Conceptually, the rules can be broken down to:

• Ask for fewer things
• Move stuff closer
• Make things smaller
• Make things less confusing

These four things are simple enough to understand, as they emphasize simplicity over complexity.

For Web site designers, these fourteen rules are critical to understanding how to drive better performance not only in existing Web sites, but in all of the sites developed in the future. They provide a vocabulary to those who are lost when discussions of Web performance occur. The fourteen rules show that Web performance can be improved, and that something can be done to make things better.

Beyond the 14 Steps

There is, however, a deeper, darker world beneath the fourteen rules. A world where complexity and interrelated components make change difficult to accomplish.

In a simple world, the fourteen rules will make a Web site faster. There is no doubt about that. They advocate for the reduction object size (for text objects), the location of content closer to the people requesting it (CDNs), and the optimization of code to accelerate the parsing and display of Web content in the browser.

Deep inside a Web site lives the presentation and application code, the guts that keep a site running. These layers, down below the waterline are responsible for the heavy lifting, the personalization of a bank account display, the retrieval of semantic search results, and the processing of complex, user-defined transactions. The data that is bounced inside a Web application flows through a myriad of network devices — firewalls, routers, switches, application proxies, etc — that can be as complex, if not more so, than the network complexity involved in delivering the content to the client.

It is fair to say that a modern Web site is the proverbial duck in a strong current.

The fourteen rules are lost down here beneath the Web layer. In these murky depths, far from the flash and glamor, parsing functions that are written poorly, database table without indices, internal networks that are poorly designed can all wreak havoc on a site that has taken all fourteen rules to heart.

When the content that is not directly controlled and managed by the Web site is added into this boiling stew, another layer of possible complexity and performance challenge appears. Third parties, CDNs, advertisers, helper applications all come from external sources that are relied on to have taken not only the fourteen rules to heart, but also to have considered how their data is created, presented, and delivered to the visitors to the Web site that appears to contain it.

Remember the Complexity

High Performance Web Sites is a volume (a pamphlet really) that delivers a simple message: there is something that can be done to improve the performance of a Web site. Souders’ fourteen rules capture the items that can be changed quickly, and at low-cost.

However, if you ask Steve Souders’ if this is all you need to do to have a fast, efficient, and reliable Web site, he should say no. The fourteen rules are an excellent start, as they handle a great deal of the visible disease that infects so many Web sites.

However, like the triathlete with an undiagnosed brain tumor, there is a lot more under the surface that needs to be addressed in order to deliver Web performance improvements that can be seen by all, and support rapid, scalable growth.

This is a book that must be read. Then deeper questions must be asked to ensure that the performance of the 90% of a Web site design not seen by visitors matches the 10% that is.

Tags: ajax, bank account display, brain tumor, DNS, helper applications, High Performance Web Sites, HTTP, internal networks, semantic search results, Steve Souders, Web application flows, Web content, Web layer, Web Performance, Web performance consulatant, Web performance improvements, Web performance problem, Web performance rules, Web site design, Web site designers

The last two days of using Chrome have had me thinking about the purpose of the Web browser in today’s world. I’ve talked about how Chrome and Firefox have changed how we see browsers, treating them as interactive windows into our daily life, rather than the uncontrolled end of an information firehose.

These applications, that on the surface seem to serve the same purpose, have taken very different paths to this point. Much has been made about Firefox growing out of the ashes of Netscape, while Chrome is the Web re-imagined.

It’s not just that.

Firefox, through the use of extensions and helper applications, has grown to become a Desktop replacement. Back when Windows for Workgroups was the primary end-user OS (and it wasn’t even an OS), Norton Desktop arrived to provide all of the tools that didn’t ship with the OS. It extended and improved on what was there, and made WFW a better place.

Firefox serves that purpose in the browser world. With its massive collections of extensions, it adds the ability to customize and modify the Web workspace. These extensions even allow the incoming content to be modified and reformatted in unique ways to suit the preferences of each individual. These features allowed the person using Firefox to feel in control, empowered.

You look at the Firefox installs of the tech elite, and no two installed versions will be configured in the same way. Firefox extends the browser into an aggregator of Web data and information customization.

But it does it at the Desktop.

Chrome is a simple container. There is (currently) no way to customize the look and feel, extend the capabilities, or modify the incoming or outgoing content. It is a simple shell designed to perform two key functions: search for content and interact with Web applications.

There are, of course, the hidden geeky functions that they have built into the app. But those don’t change what it’s core function is: request, receive, and render Web pages as quickly and efficiently as possible. Unlike Firefox’s approach, which places the app being the center of the Web, Chrome places the Web at the center of the Web.

There is no right or wrong approach. As with all things in this complicated world we are in, it depends. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish and how you want to get there.

The conflict that I see appearing over the next few months is not between IE and Firefox and Safari and Opera and Chrome. It is a conflict over what the people want from an application that they use all the time. Do they want a Web desktop or a Web container?

Tags: add-ons, application, browser, Chrome, extension, Firefox, helper applications, IE, Internet Explorer, web, web application, web applications, Web browser, web container, Web data, web desktop, Web workspace, Windows