I’m in the process right now of signing on for my first speaking gig in since I moved to Boston (thanks to @joedevon) and it got me thinking about performance in CSS; a topic I really haven’t address in years since I started using my single-line CSS formatting style. Tip: use spaces rather than tabbing to maintain the alignment across different software since they all treat the “tab” differently.

But I digress.

CSS Performance

We’ve all seen the mass of articles & tutorials about JavaScript performance, how to optimize jQuery, and the JS Performance test suite. The market is flooded, ok, we get it. JavaScript is a beast of the Web that needs to be constantly tamed. It’s getting better, especially with lightning-fast JS engine , V8 looming around in Chome and NodeJS.

CSS performance is constantly overshadowed by JS performance (and rightly so), but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least take a look at it every now-and-then as a form of checks and balances for our front-end code. After all, something like 90% of the load time for a site happens on the front-end and unless you’re Google, it’s probably not all JavaScript (little bit of a big there, sorry fellas).

OOCSS

Object Oriented CSS goes a little like this:

The CSS

.rounded{ border-radius:7px; }
.box-shadow{ -moz-box-shadow:0 2px 2px #333;box-shadow:0 2px 0 #333; }
.left{ float:left; }

The HTML

<div class="rounded box-shadow left"></div> <!--/.rounded .box-shadow .left-->

You’re basically just separating out the individual properties you’ll be using and modifying the HTML to reflect them. It’s very similar to a framework model in building and styling a site.

Whether you like it or not, there it is. There’s a lot of debate over this method, pluses and minuses, loves and hates. The most popular argument against it is that you’re embedding style information into your HTML and semi-collapses the progressive enhancement model of structure — presentation — behavior.

It’s tough for me to totally buy into OOCSS for that reason. I stick very closely to progressive enhancement while I’m building a site and really only stray from that when I’m styling for a CMS and I need classes like: “left”, “right”, “clear”, etc., which get applied by the user later on.

So, when styling for use in a CMS, I really do think OOCSS is dead-on. I’ve yet to fully use it just because I question it’s maintainability. But from a strictly performance stand point: Is OOCSS better? Yea, it’s better. It does perform better across the board than almost all of the CSS selectors (especially the advanced ones).

Lastly, on performance

We can all go through ySlow and JSLint to see where we may have some front-end memory leaks but getting down to the granularity of the way we’re constructing a page (OOCSS vs. non-OOCSS) is tough without running the explicit performance tests.

As the Web gets more and more advanced and browsers like Chrome pave the way for faster sites, I have no idea what the real answer for CSS performance is, but I do know that browsers will not help you write better code. We still need to explore the best practices, be it front-end, back-end or somewhere in the middle.

I’d like to get into this in more detail, but I have a group of tourists screaming at eachother in French next to me (trying out a new coffee shop), so I defer to the comments if you’re at all interesting in the OOCSS debate.