On Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:59:05 -0500, chasd chasd@silveroaks.com wrote:
On Mar 12, 2008, at 1:30 PM, Oscar Carlsson wrote:
Hi everybody!
Till asked me to ask the rest of the devs about their opinion regarding http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1484858, "Speed up the interface loading by using CSS sprites for images".
It wasn't that long ago that everyone split big images into many smaller ones to make the page appear to load faster because there were many connections to the server. There are features in Photoshop / ImageReady to do just that. Seems there is a pendulum that swings between many small images and few large images. Will RC change again when this pendulum swings back the other way ?
With the speed of most Internet connections today, it's no the transfer that takes time, it's the connection. This wasn't the case earlier with slow modem connections, that's why it was better to split images then.
Take a look at: http://tools.pingdom.com. Try your favorite website. You'll quickly see that it takes a looong time from "Start" to "First byte" (look at "How it works" for color explanation), but transfering the image is fast. That's why this method is popular, it uses the connection speed better. Of course, this is only possible to use with buttons, logos and such static images, but there are many of those in RC.
Is it a better solution to load images in the background while the user is typing in the login info, so that the images are cached by the time the "login" button is pushed ?
You can go as far as to include the raw image in the CSS if I remember correctly ;)
If RC is used a lot by the user, won't the images reside in the local browser cache 90% of the time anyway ? Besides first-time users, will this change really make a difference ?
Don't know if sprites will have an effect or not considering this.
/Oscar Carlsson
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