Professional Front-End Engineering
Nate began by giving us a bit of historical context to the way Yahoo! has evolved over the years.
He then covered topics such as Yahoo’s server architecture, graded browser support [see below], progressive enhancement, unobtrusive JavaScript etc.
He suggests we all have an interesting set of decisions to make regarding front-end design:
- Do what is standard
if impossible, then - Do what is common
if impossible, then - Do what it takes
Then we get on to:
- Do what is simple
+ - Do what is flexible & progressive
+ - Do what is open
This is in order to satisfy the multiple audiences for any website: Users, Developers, Machines.
At Yahoo!, they focus on 8 specific areas:
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Accessibility
- Internationalisation
- Performance
- Infrastructre & Process
- Tooling
They use tools such as JSLint to check code for quality, and adopt the idioms it promotes to improve their code. Also, unit testing with YUI Test.
There’s much more detail in his slides (see below).
Nate’s presentation: slides (blog/slideshare) | audio (mp3)
