All of my pals laugh at me for carrying a packing square with USB C–C, A–C, Lightning, EU adapters, and three-pin plugs. Until they need to borrow one.
I’m a web performance engineer — I help clients find and fix site speed issues — but recently I spotted what I thought might be a security/privacy issue. Security not being my specialism, I asked Fable to help me triage and, if necessary, raise the issue with my client.
It refused. It’s so so so adjacent to the work we’d already been doing, but the moment I asked it to help me understand what I thought I’d found, it left me high and dry!
Sometimes the context where Fable drops to Opus 4.8 is enough for Opus 4.8 to do a first pass on everything, then I start a new session and Fable will happily refactor/improve it.
Complete side note: I’m on public wifi right now and the domain used to host the images in this article is, for some reason, blocked. But as the author (or whatever tool was used to generate the article) has taken time to write decent `alt` text, I can still get a good idea of what is going on. Kudos.
I used to share this sentiment (and I’m a web performance consultant by profession so very few people care about performance as much as me!), but when you consider how much calculation we _happily_ let our JS do at runtime, I don’t think forcing CSS to be static/preprocessed is worth it. And that’s not even me taking a swipe at overly-JSsed front-end; I’m talking about any runtime work that JS picks up.
Is preprocessed CSS faster? Yes. Is it meaningfully faster? Probably not.
An optimisation I've always wondered about for transforming/translating/animating elements: is it faster to use JS translations or animation API directly on the element (e.g. style.transform / element.animate), or updating CSS variables with JS to let the CSS engine reposition inheriting elements?
In the context of animations, I'd intuit the latter but would be open to hearing why.
jQuery has .animate() which uses the JS API and used to be very popular. When CSS Animations became available, that part of jQuery became obsolete overnight.
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