Yellow is the New Blog

Yahoo! has done extensive research on how to optimize web site performance, and for some time now has maintained a list of best practices that summarize the results of that research, along with detailed descriptions of why each guideline enhances site performance. Two of their guidelines that go hand in hand are as follows:

• Put stylesheets at the top: the closer to the top of the HEAD your stylesheets are, the more progressively the page will render. Strictly speaking, this doesn't allow the page to load more rapidly, but the progressive rendering speeds up the display of the page once it has loaded.
• Put scripts at the bottom: this may seem counter-intuitive, especially if you're used to cramming all of your script into the JSHeader object in a Domino design element (.....please don't) instead of defining it in libraries or file resources that are then loaded via script tags, but script should be as close to the bottom of the BODY as possible.

Check out Yahoo!'s list for more detail on why they recommend these (and other practices) for maximizing site performance. Thus far I haven't experienced anything in my own development that contradicts their recommendations.

Thought this might come in handy for some of you... if you've avoided upgrading to IE7 because you're supporting IE6 users, but want to test your applications in IE7 to be sure they won't break when your users do upgrade, there's a way to run multiple versions on the same machine. Upgrade to IE7, then download the executable hosted here. This allows you to install versions 3 through 6 (or any subset thereof) without actually installing them... it uses "DLL redirection" to allow each version to behave as it would if it were the only version installed.