Faster HTML and CSS: Layout Engine Internals for Web Developers

Google Tech Talks November 12, 2008 ABSTRACT How fast Web pages load and how fast they change dynamically depends on both the Web page and the browser it's running in. Browser makers put significant effort into making their browsers faster, but there are also things that Web page authors can do to make their pages more responsive. I plan to talk about HTML, CSS, and the DOM in Mozilla, from the DOM tree and CSS style sheets through to displaying pixels on the screen. In particular, what do Mozilla-based browsers spend the time doing when they're displaying a Web page? Which parts of this work are redone when the page is changed by script? And what implications does this have for how authors can make their pages faster, and for how authors can test the performance of their pages? Speaker: David Baron David is a software engineer at Mozilla Corporation, where he works on Mozilla's implementations of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and layout algorithms (computing the positions of objects), fixing memory leaks, and other things. He has been working on Mozilla since 1998, and is a member of the W3C CSS working group.