Three nice tips for web developers.

Actually, two basic dev tips and one neat resource site.

First tip is regarding dynamic HTML. We've been encountering some rendering performance problems with huge tables, and after some investigation, here are some pointers:

• Do not use tables. They're bad for you, especially large ones, and nested tables. By the way, YUI creates lots of inner tables. You can read some more with this link, top answer has some great detailed arguments for you. I know it's a corny advice, but there are lots of frameworks out there that use tables, even gwt.
• Do not create each dom element separately - If you need to create a very large table/ chunk of html, it's better to create a huge html string and then insert it into dom for processing, rather than use the dom to create each element, and the append them. Think of it as using 1000 'native' calls from a VM rather than 1 long call. The overhead for each dom element is huge.
• Establish a maximum size for a list and browse through results. Google does that with search results, why don't you? You can cache results in javascript, or keep an index to the query and go back to the server to fetch the next n entries, but displaying one thousand items for a user is highly ineffective. 

Second tip is rather basic - Regarding server/ client processing and separation. As we're moving towards cpu consumption related billing rather than permanent hosting, we need to rethink what we do on the server and on the client side. The main principal would be having the server perform validation and data (model), and do the rest in the client:

• Your server code should not create html. It should either create status/ session/ json, but not html. This is just a waste of server cpu. It speeds up server response, and when written well, makes client experience better. It scales a whole lot better.
• You must think of your client and server modules as replaceable. This means that if you're writing a server, imagine that you need to write two completely different (Say html and iOS) clients for it.
• If you're afraid that competitors may reverse engineer your client html/ js/ css code, you can always minimize it, or get an obfuscator.

Final tip is this site. Microsoft is putting a lot of effort these days - It's great to see them as the underdog. You'll find Azure php sdk, nice html5 references, and lots of useful resources. Check it out. I'm considering Azure for a project I'm working on, the php sdk seems quite cool.

Have a great week!
y.