The RAIL pattern

The RAIL pattern is an acronym used by the Google Chrome team to define one of the many WPO patterns you should try to follow. Its goal is to ensure your user experience is responsive:

  • Response: How quickly there is a response when there is any input
  • Animation: Includes visual animation, scrolling, and dragging
  • Idle: Background work
  • Load: How quickly a page can achieve the first meaningful paint

Where the PRPL pattern is concerned with resource loading, RAIL is about the runtime user experience or what happens once the resources are loaded.

The pattern is designed to be user centric, focusing on performance first. The four aspects that make up the acronym are distinct areas of a web application and page's life cycle, or ...

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