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Recently, a HN job post brought me to a career page. It served up a 1MB css file, a 650K [mostly red] png image, and a 300K black and white png. I don't know w

by latch 12y ago

Recently, a HN job post brought me to a career page. It served up a 1MB css file, a 650K [mostly red] png image, and a 300K black and white png. I don't know whether it's incompetence or indifference, but for most sites, slow loads is a developer, not a tool or design, issue.

iamben 12y ago
I agree to a point - I think it's maybe thought about a bit more by those who were building sites when a 1mb page meant a 5 minute download. For those that grew up taking high speed Internet for granted it's thought about a lot less. That said, when the only way to get the design to work is using alpha transparency, and you know you need a massive 24bit PNG you're caught between a rock and a hard place. Especially when you then have to think about creating the same image at double size to serve to retina displays (because the client asks "why is it fuzzy on my ipad/mac/phone?") - page sizes start to get out of control.
- rangibaby 12y ago
  Your point is valid, but using imagealpha allows you to have alpha channel in 8bit pngs. www.pngmini.com
  - iamben 12y ago
    That's fantastic, thank you. I've been using TinyPNG.com - will give this a go :-)
rattray 12y ago
If you want people to do more of something, make it easier for them to do. Making it easier to optimize web resources with a `<picture>` tag may help some developers take the steps to actually optimize where they didn't before (even with existing tools).
userbinator 12y ago
I'd say it is a bit of a design issue too - I remember when the majority of images on sites were actually "contentful" (for lack of a better term), and not just something like a gradient or glittering button. The practice of providing a thumbnail/preview that links to the full-sized version was common, so you wouldn't be unnecessarily loading images you didn't want to see at full resolution. In some ways, this almost feels like spacer.gif all over again.

by latch 12y ago

iamben 12y ago

I agree to a point - I think it's maybe thought about a bit more by those who were building sites when a 1mb page meant a 5 minute download. For those that grew up taking high speed Internet for granted it's thought about a lot less. That said, when the only way to get the design to work is using alpha transparency, and you know you need a massive 24bit PNG you're caught between a rock and a hard place. Especially when you then have to think about creating the same image at double size to serve to retina displays (because the client asks "why is it fuzzy on my ipad/mac/phone?") - page sizes start to get out of control.

rangibaby 12y ago
Your point is valid, but using imagealpha allows you to have alpha channel in 8bit pngs. www.pngmini.com
- iamben 12y ago
  That's fantastic, thank you. I've been using TinyPNG.com - will give this a go :-)

rattray 12y ago

If you want people to do more of something, make it easier for them to do. Making it easier to optimize web resources with a `<picture>` tag may help some developers take the steps to actually optimize where they didn't before (even with existing tools).

userbinator 12y ago

I'd say it is a bit of a design issue too - I remember when the majority of images on sites were actually "contentful" (for lack of a better term), and not just something like a gradient or glittering button. The practice of providing a thumbnail/preview that links to the full-sized version was common, so you wouldn't be unnecessarily loading images you didn't want to see at full resolution. In some ways, this almost feels like spacer.gif all over again.