Top all-time · #2413
Nicole Sullivan
Personal blog · stubbornella.org/contentwebprogramming
Nicole Sullivan's personal blog at stubbornella.org covers web and programming. Since 2010, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 33 times, most often “Mistakes of Massive CSS”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-03-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Mistakes of Massive CSS3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-07-07
- Reflows and repaints: CSS performance making your JavaScript slow? (2009)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-07-15
- Creating Living Style Guides to Improve Performance3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-06-26
- Our (CSS) Best Practices Are Killing Us3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-06-23
- /content/2010/06/25/the-media-object-saves-hundreds-of-lines-of-code/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-10-19
- Cross-Browser Debugging CSS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-03
- CSS Overflow: A Secret Benefit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-03-16
- /content/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-03-28
- Why is computer science a sausage fest? 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-07-27
What Hacker News says?
This is my favorite recent example of thoughtless discrimination against women: http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2014/05/09/sexist-by-des... And you can see it's not a particularly new problem: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/09/glass-staircase-not-dre...
Comment linking /content/2014/05/09/sexist-by-design/
on “Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries”Submitted Why I run my business like an open source project (2013) as a story · 129 points
HN discussionYes they can. If you are interested here is how the rendering works. The rendering happens in batches, the first render is always an expensive operation and includes both "paint" & "layout". - The "layout"-operation recalculates the tree of visible elements. - The "paint"-operation paints the element and is commonly done using a software rasterizer. Every subsequent render happens if an DOM-element triggers a layout…
Comment linking /content/2009/03/27/reflows-repaints-css-performance-making-your-javascript-slow/
on “Flipboard releases React Canvas”Submitted Why is computer science a sausage fest? as a story · 80 points
HN discussionI'm just going to leave here some of my CSS Good Practices bookmarks: * https://github.com/necolas/idiomatic-css * http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/08/from-table-hel... * http://engineering.appfolio.com/2012/11/16/css-architecture/ * http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2011/04/28/our-best-prac...
Comment linking /content/2011/04/28/our-best-practices-are-killing-us/
on “Shame.css”Submitted Multitasking is killing me (and probably you too) as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSometimes we take the whole semantics thing to a point where it's counterproductive. Not every single selector has to be semantic. That's how get into situations like the ones that lead to Nicole Sullivan writing "Our best practices are killing us": http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2011/04/28/our-best-prac...
Comment linking /content/2011/04/28/our-best-practices-are-killing-us/
on “Web Designers should all be using this idea by now: Font Icons.”Submitted Our (CSS) Best Practices Are Killing Us as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSuprised no-one has mentioned Nicole Sullivan's (amongst others) Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS) project: https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/wiki She used this approach at Facebook (and Yahoo, I think?) to successfully tidy up a huge code base of thousands of CSS files down to a more manageable few. I attended her workshop at Webstock and since then had a chance to put it into practice on a 'get it up quick' green fi…
Comment linking /content/
on “Ask HN: Anyone have a really smart way to organize css?”Submitted Cross-Browser Debugging CSS as a story · 4 points
HN discussionNo I'm not arguing for style attributes, that's a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen (with very little waiting needed!). They are a layer of indirection indeed, but which of these do you think conveys more information/semantics to the developer (these aren't bootstrap specific classes, just illustrative): <div class="sidebar"> <!-- content --> </div> <!-- or --> <div class="sidebar grid-one-whole grid-one-half-…
Comment linking /content/2010/06/25/the-media-object-saves-hundreds-of-lines-of-code/
on “Bootstrap 3”Submitted CSS Overflow: A Secret Benefit as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLooks like he just rewrote the ideas of [Nicole Sullivan]( http://stubbornella.org ) and [Harry Roberts]( http://csswizardry.com ).
Comment linking /
on “CSS Architecture”Submitted Reflows and repaints: CSS performance making your JavaScript slow? (2009) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere is a video presentation on a similar subject from last year. http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2010/07/01/top-5-mistake...
Comment linking /content/2010/07/01/top-5-mistakes-of-massive-css/
on “CSS: Our best practices are killing us”Submitted Mistakes of Massive CSS as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAt the cost of poor performance on the client [1], so you're just pushing any time saved in development onto your user. The only way around the poor performance of table layouts is to use table-layout: fixed, which then means you lose all responsive layout so you'd need to create a new version for every screen size you wanted to support (and implicitly, not be able to support every size of mobile screen since percen…
Comment linking /content/2009/03/27/reflows-repaints-css-performance-making-your-javascript-slow/
on “Ask HN: Why Haven't GUI Front End Editors Caught On?”Submitted Don’t Feed the Trolls (video) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you assumed I was offended by his post, you're far off. I'm only disappointed. The evidence is this blog post and the countless ones like it saying how tough it is for a woman to get into programming without being bombarded with negative attention just because of their gender. As I said in the other reply, there is no way to perfectly measure discrimination. If you don't trust the various testimonies by women in…
Comment linking /content/2010/07/26/woman-in-technology/
on “When She Codes, The Revolution’s Coming ”Submitted I run my business like an open source project (2013) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI really like seeing companies build out their own style guide libraries. It's such a huge win in terms of maintaining css and keeping it consistent across an entire site/platform. We went through this process at Trulia about a year ago, and the results had a huge impact[1]. Sadly we never released our style guide to the public, but we did open source the tool for building it: https://github.com/trulia/hologram It t…
Comment linking /content/2013/06/05/creating-living-style-guides-to-improve-performance/
on “Yelp’s Style Guide”Submitted Creating Living Style Guides to Improve Performance as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere's the first few hits from Google: https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/reflow https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/javascript-dom http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2009/03/27/reflows-repai...
Comment linking /content/2009/03/27/reflows-repaints-css-performance-making-your-javascript-slow/
on “Why is the mobile web slow?”Submitted Creating Living Style Guides to Improve Performance as a story · 1 points
HN discussionShe has a blog post explaining the x's here: http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2010/12/09/the-hacktasti... Edit: I also agree with your sentiment. This seems to move away from what CSS classes are intended for, and gives things naming conventions that are tied directly to their internal CSS code instead of to their semantic meaning on the page. That said, I haven't used it either, so maybe it's way better this way…
Comment linking /content/2010/12/09/the-hacktastic-zoom-fix/
on “Object Oriented CSS”Submitted Cross-Browser Debugging CSS as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI like Lea Verou: http://lea.verou.me and Nicole Sullivan: http://www.stubbornella.org/content/
Comment linking /content/
on “Ask HN: Inspiring female programming blogs?”Submitted Overflow – a secret benefit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThey're different approaches to managing the connection between presentation and the page. Mainly it's whether you're handling changes to the presentation primarily through the CSS or through the HTML. -Semantic markup stresses using classes on DOM elements that describe what they are rather than how they look. Example: instead of using span class="red", use span class="error", to avoid the ridiculousness of having…
Comment linking /content/2010/06/25/the-media-object-saves-hundreds-of-lines-of-code/
on “A classless class—on using more classes in your HTML”Submitted Code formatting for CSS Gradients as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
