This content originally appeared on web.dev and was authored by Una Kravets
The
content-visibility
property, launching in Chromium 85, might be one of the most impactful new CSS
properties for improving page load performance. content-visibility enables the
user agent to skip an element's rendering work, including layout and painting,
until it is needed. Because rendering is skipped, if a large portion of your
content is off-screen, leveraging the content-visibility property makes the
initial user load much faster. It also allows for faster interactions with the
on-screen content. Pretty neat.
content-visibility: auto to chunked content areas gives a 7x rendering performance boost on initial load. Read on to learn more.
Browser support
content-visibility relies on primitives within the the CSS Containment
Spec. While content-visibility is only
supported in Chromium 85 for now (and deemed "worth
prototyping" for
Firefox), the Containment Spec is supported in most modern
browsers.
CSS Containment
The key and overarching goal of CSS containment is to enable rendering performance improvements of web content by providing predictable isolation of a DOM subtree from the rest of the page.
Basically a developer can tell a browser what parts of the page are encapsulated as a set of content, allowing the browsers to reason about the content without needing to consider state outside of the subtree. Knowing which bits of content (subtrees) contain isolated content means the browser can make optimization decisions for page rendering.
There are four types of CSS
containment,
each a potential value for the contain CSS property, which can be combined
together in a space-separated list of values:
size: Size containment on an element ensures that the element's box can be laid out without needing to examine its descendants. This means we can potentially skip layout of the descendants if all we need is the size of the element.layout: Layout containment means that the descendants do not affect the external layout of other boxes on the page. This allows us to potentially skip layout of the descendants if all we want to do is lay out other boxes.style: Style containment ensures that properties which can have effects on more than just its descendants don't escape the element (e.g. counters). This allows us to potentially skip style computation for the descendants if all we want is to compute styles on other elements.paint: Paint containment ensures that the descendants of the containing box don't display outside its bounds. Nothing can visibly overflow the element, and if an element is off-screen or otherwise not visible, its descendants will also not be visible. This allows us to potentially skip painting the descendants if the element is offscreen.
Skipping rendering work with content-visibility
It may be hard to figure out which containment values to use, since browser
optimizations may only kick in when an appropriate set is specified. You can
play around with the values to see what works
best, or you
can use another CSS property called content-visibility to apply the needed
containment automatically. content-visibility ensures that you get the largest
performance gains the browser can provide with minimal effort from you as a
developer.
The content-visibility property accepts several values, but auto is the one
that provides immediate performance improvements. An element that has
content-visibility: auto gains layout, style and paint containment. If
the element is off-screen (and not otherwise relevant to the user—relevant
elements would be the ones that have focus or selection in their subtree), it
also gains size containment (and it stops
painting
and
hit-testing
its contents).
What does this mean? In short, if the element is off-screen its descendants are not rendered. The browser determines the size of the element without considering any of its contents, and it stops there. Most of the rendering, such as styling and layout of the element's subtree are skipped.
As the element approaches the viewport, the browser no longer adds the size
containment and starts painting and hit-testing the element's content. This
enables the rendering work to be done just in time to be seen by the user.
Example: a travel blog
content-visibility: auto to chunked areas on the left. The results show rendering times going from 232ms to 30ms on initial page load.A travel blog typically contains a set of stories with a few pictures, and some descriptive text. Here is what happens in a typical browser when it navigates to a travel blog:
- A part of the page is downloaded from the network, along with any needed resources.
- The browser styles and lays out all of the contents of the page, without considering if the content is visible to the user.
- The browser goes back to step 1 until all of the page and resources are downloaded.
In step 2, the browser processes all of the contents looking for things that may have changed. It updates the style and layout of any new elements, along with the elements that may have shifted as a result of new updates. This is rendering work. This takes time.
Now consider what happens if you put content-visibility: auto on each of the
individual stories in the blog. The general loop is the same: the browser
downloads and renders chunks of the page. However, the difference is in the
amount of work that it does in step 2.
With content-visibility, it will style and layout all of the contents that are currently visible to the user (they are on-screen). However, when processing the story that is fully off-screen, the browser will skip the rendering work and only style and layout the element box itself.
The performance of loading this page would be as if it contained full on-screen stories and empty boxes for each of the off-screen stories. This performs much better, with expected reduction of 50% or more from the rendering cost of loading. In our example, we see a boost from a 232ms rendering time to a 30ms rendering time. That's a 7x performance boost.
What is the work that you need to do in order to reap these benefits? First, we chunk the content into sections:
story class applied, to receive content-visibility: auto. See Demo on Codepen
Then, we apply the following style rule to the sections:
.story {
content-visibility: auto;
contain-intrinsic-size: 1000px; /* Explained in the next section. */
}Note that as content moves in and out of visibility, it will start and stop being rendered as needed. However, this does not mean that the browser will have to render and re-render the same content over and over again, since the rendering work is saved when possible.
Specifying the natural size of an element with contain-intrinsic-size
In order to realize the potential benefits of content-visibility, the browser
needs to apply size containment to ensure that the rendering results of contents
do not affect the size of the element in any way. This means that the element
will lay out as if it was empty. If the element does not have a height specified
in a regular block layout, then it will be of 0 height.
This might not be ideal, since the size of the scrollbar will shift, being reliant on each story having a non-zero height.
Thankfully, CSS provides another property, contain-intrinsic-size, which
effectively specifies the natural size of the element if the element is
affected by size containment. In our example, we are setting it to 1000px as
an estimate for the height and width of the sections.
This means it will lay out as if it had a single child of "intrinsic-size"
dimensions, ensuring that your unsized divs still occupy space.
contain-intrinsic-size acts as a placeholder size in lieu of rendered content.
Hiding content with content-visibility: hidden
What if you want to keep the content unrendered regardless of whether or not it
is on-screen, while leveraging the benefits of cached rendering state? Enter:
content-visibility: hidden.
The content-visibility: hidden property gives you all of the same benefits of
unrendered content and cached rendering state as content-visibility: auto does
off-screen. However, unlike with auto, it does not automatically start to
render on-screen.
This gives you more control, allowing you to hide an element's contents and later unhide them quickly.
Compare it to other common ways of hiding element's contents:
display: none: hides the element and destroys its rendering state. This means unhiding the element is as expensive as rendering a new element with the same contents.visibility: hidden: hides the element and keeps its rendering state. This doesn't truly remove the element from the document, as it (and it's subtree) still takes up geometric space on the page and can still be clicked on. It also updates the rendering state any time it is needed even when hidden.
content-visibility: hidden, on the other hand, hides the element while
preserving its rendering state, so, if there are any changes that need to
happen, they only happen when the element is shown again (i.e. the
content-visibility: hidden property is removed).
Some great use cases for content-visibility: hidden are when implementing
advanced virtual scrollers, and measuring layout.
Conclusion
content-visibility and the CSS Containment Spec mean some exciting performance
boosts are coming right to your CSS file. For more information on these
properties, check out:
This content originally appeared on web.dev and was authored by Una Kravets
Una Kravets | Sciencx (2020-08-05T00:00:00+00:00) `content-visibility`: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2020/08/05/content-visibility-the-new-css-property-that-boosts-your-rendering-performance/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.