Ajax Performance

Look how far we’ve come

Paul Irish has put together a nice timeline of CSS selector development, showing all the hard scripting work that has gone into providing this facility. It’s interesting to walk through the iterations — each generation appears to be larger than the prior, but performance is generally improving along with capability and accuracy.

This type of analysis is also interesting at a meta level: Ajax has been around long enough that we can have meaningfully detailed conversations about the evolution of our techniques. We’ve come a long way, and it’s gratifying every now and then to take a step back and look at all the little steps that got us here.