Do those stylesheets really need to be in the page body?

I once worked on a medium size enterprise software project that felt very sluggish and slow. I was new to the technology stack, new to anything but small web applications and I figured it just wasn't possible to get that particular stack any faster.

As the project went on features were added, more optimizations were added by expensive consultants,  a few performance regressions were weeded out but the app was still as sluggish as ever until one day the ux designer came and asked if there was any reason the consultants needed the stylesheet in the page body instead of in the head.

There wasn't, and at the next deploy the app was suddenly a whole lot faster and smoother. So much for the cruft of StringBuilder for every string concatenation. So much for higly efficient log statements, each spanning three lines, applied liberally across the whole codebase.

From that day on I became a little more pragmatic, a little less uninformed regarding that particular stack, the expensive consultants that happend to know it and optimizations for web applications.

Disclaimer: Of course, I'm not saying you should ditch StringBuilder and stop checking if debugIsEnabled() in thight loops, but in the average controller code in the average enterprise web project I guess they won't matter much.

The real reason why we don't use silverlight or flash

I think I speak on behalf of a lot of people if a say:

A lot of silverlight & flash fans are missing the point: We know about flash. It's not that we somehow do not "get" silverlight. We program Java, PHP, Python, -list goes on and for many of us also includes C# and actionscript. We do use a lot of different frameworks. Learning new stuff is part of our daily grind (and to be honest, we mostly love it.)

We also do struggle with fonts that might or might not be available, css rendered differently in IE etc. We just don't want to add dependencies to

• big,
• cpu-hogging,
• closed source plugins
• that might or might not be supported on our future favourite operating system

to our nicely crafted and cross browser compatible web sites. Hey, -we might not even be allowed by the customer to do that, and even if we were, I think most of us would explain the customer/boss in question why they should be careful to do that.