CHAPTER 4 Culture of Performance
a lighT baSe
“Be prepared.” That’s the Boy Scout motto. When I was growing up, I took
that to heart. Whenever I was going on a trip, I would pack everything I
could. My default state was to make sure I had everything with me, in case
I needed it.
We often take a similar approach online. Before anything is even built,
many projects will include a JavaScript framework, just in case. Before
any analysis is done to determine whether one is needed, a CSS frame-
work might get loaded. Boilerplates, meant to provide a starting point
from which you can trim down, are left as is. Image carousels are added at
random as a way to get more stuff onto a page. These projects are like the
proverbial pocketknife — everything is there, just in case we need it.
The opposite should be true: everything that gets added to a page —
each script, each image, every line of code — must be justified. It needs to
serve a purpose. We know this from a visual design perspective; any de-
signer worth their salt will tell you why the decision was made to include
this image or that icon.
Performance should inform that discussion as well. Not only should
an image serve a purpose, but its value should outweigh its cost. No free
lunch and all that.
As for frameworks and boilerplates: there’s nothing wrong with them.
They’re incredibly valuable tools when applied with care and used appro-
priately. But they are not without their own faults and there is cause for
concern when they are the base from which we start, instead of tools we
carefully add when needed.
If we want to reverse the troublesome trend of increasingly bloated
websites we need to start with better defaults and be judicious about ev-
erything we put on our sites.
It’s been shown time and time again that people love to stick with the
default options. One frequently cited study deals with default options for