Mile
Zero

It's an accepted truth on the web that fast pages are better for users — people stay on them longer, follow more links from them, and generally report being happier with them. I think a lot about performance on my projects, because I want readers to be thinking about the story, not distracted by slow load times.

Unfortunately, web performance has a bad rap, in part because it's a complicated topic. Making it work effectively and efficiently means learning a lot about how the browser runtime works, and optimizing for new techniques like GPU transforms. Like everything else in web development, there's also a lot of misinformation out there, and a lot of people who insist that everything was better back when we built everything without all the JavaScript and fancy-pants frameworks.

It's possible that I've been more aware of it, just because I've been working on a project that involves smoothly animating a chart using regular HTML instead of canvas, but it seems like it's been a bad month for that kind of thing. First Peter-Paul Koch wrote a diatribe about client-side templating, insisting that it's a needless performance hit. Then Flipboard wrote about discarding traditional elements entirely, instead rendering everything to a canvas tag in pursuit of 60 frames/second animations. Ironically, you'll notice that these are radically different approaches that both claim they create a better experience.

Instead of just sighing while the usual native app advocates use these posts to bash the web, and given that I am working on a page where high-performance mobile animations are a key part, I thought it'd be nice to talk about some experiments I've run with the approaches found in both. There are a lot of places where the web platform needs help competing on mobile, no doubt. But I'd prefer we talk about actual performance problems, and not get sidetracked into chasing down scattered criticisms without evidence.

Let's start with templating, which is serving as a stand-in for client-side JavaScript in general. PPK argues that templating (and by extension, single-page app design) is terrible for performance, but is that true? While I was working on my graph, I worried a little bit about startup time. Since I write JavaScript on both the server and the client, it was pretty easy to port my code from one to the other and check. I personally found the results conclusive, and a little surprising.

The client-side version of the page weighed in at 10KB and spent roughly 35ms in JavaScript during startup, rendering the page and prepping its data structures. That's actually not bad for something that's doing some fairly heavy positioning and styling, and it fits in the 14KB first TCP round-trip recommended by Google. In contrast, the server-side page, in which all the markup was pre-rendered and then progressively enhanced after page load, was 160KB and spent about 30ms in JavaScript. In other words, following PPK's advice to avoid client-side templating caused the page to be sixteen times larger, and still required two video frames to start up.

Now, this is a slightly special case: unlike typical server applications, my news apps are useless without JavaScript. They're not RESTful, they don't talk to a database, they involve a lot of moving parts. But even I was surprised by how little impact client-side templating actually had. Browsers these days are just ridiculously fast at assembling HTML. So while I don't recommend doing the entire page this way, or abandoning server-generated HTML entirely, it's pretty clear to me that it's not the slam-dunk case that holdouts for traditional server rendering claim it is.

At the other extreme is Flipboard's experiment with canvas rendering. Instead of putting everything in the document, like normal websites, they put a full-screen canvas image up and render everything — text, images, animations, etc. — manually to that buffer. You can try a demo out on your device here. On my Nexus 5, which is a reasonably new device running the latest version of Chrome, it's noticeably choppy. My experience with canvas is that Chrome's implementation is actually much faster than Safari, so I don't expect it to be smooth on iOS either (they've blacklisted tablets, so I can't be sure).

In order to get this "fluid" experience, here's what the Flipboard team threw away:

• Accessibility: nothing on the page actually exists to a screen reader. Users that invert their screens or change the text size to make it easier to read are out of luck.
• Copy and paste: since there's no document, there's nothing to select for these basic text operations.
• Real links: you can't open pages in a new tab. You can't share them using the OS share panel. You can't do anything with the links, because they aren't really there.
• GPU acceleration: by doing everything in canvas, they've ignored all the optimizations that browsers actually do to ensure a smooth, battery-efficient experience.
• View source: inspecting the Flipboard page gives you no information at all, and the JavaScript is minified without source maps. The app is completely opaque to anyone who wants to learn from it.

The irony of doing all this work for a fluid experience that isn't actually fluid is that the kinds of animations they're doing — transform and opacity — are actually the exact properties that browsers can animate at 60FPS. Much has been written about using GPU compositing for smooth animations, but this article is a great start. If Flipboard had stuck with the DOM and used the GPU fully, they probably could have had fluid animations without leaving all those other features behind.

That's an easy thing to say, but is it true? Here's another experiment from my stacked bar chart: when a toggle is pressed, the chart shifts from being a measure of absolute numbers to relative proportions, with each bar smoothly animating up to 100%. I'm using an adaptation of Paul Lewis' FLIP technique, in which animations are set in JavaScript but run via CSS transitions. In my case, each of the 160+ blocks is measured, assigned a transform to "freeze" it in place as a new GPU layer, then transitioned to its final position with a second transform and "thawed" back into a regular, responsive element.

Even though I'm animating many more elements than Flipboard is doing in their demo, the animation is perfectly smooth on my Nexus 5, and on the aging iPad we use for testing. By doing all the hard computational work up front, and then handing the pre-computed transitions over to the browser, I'm actually not JavaScript-bound at all: everything is done on the graphics chip, and in the C++ compositing layer. The result is a smooth 60FPS during the animation, all done via regular DOM elements. So much for "If you touch the DOM in any way during an animation you’ve already blown through your 16ms frame budget."

Again, I'm not claiming that my use case is a perfect analogue. I'm animating a graphic in response to a single button press, and they're attempting to create an "infinite scroll" (sort of — it's not really a scroll so much as an animated pager). But this idea that "the DOM is lava" and touching it will cause your reader's phones to instantly burst into flames of scorn seems patently ridiculous, especially when we look back at that list of everything that was sacrificed in the single-minded pursuit of speed.

Performance is important, and I care deeply and obsessively about it. As a gamer and a graphics nerd, I love tweaking out those last few frames per second, or adding flashy effects to a page. But it's not the most important thing. It's not more important than making your content available to the blind or visually impaired. It's not more important than providing standard UI actions like copy-and-paste or "open in new tab." And it's not more important than providing a fallback for older and less-powerful devices, the kind that are used by poor readers. Let's keep speed in perspective on the web, and not get so caught up in dogma that we abandon useful techniques like client-side templating and the DOM.