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Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization Review by Alexander Bunkenburg
Shorter html and css at all costs?
Description
The book has six parts.
The first part says that because web users are willing to wait for at most eight seconds and many use a 56.6Kbps modem, web pages should be at most 30KB in size.
The second part lists tricks how to write shorter html.
The third part lists tricks how to write shorter css and javascript.
The fourth part discusses graphics and multimedia optimization.
The fifth part explains methodically how to make your web come up high in search engines.
The sixth part details some server-side tricks for Apache.
Comment
This book concentrates almost exclusively on sending fewer bytes from the server to the browser. It gives a large collection of tricks how to write shorter html, xhtml, css, and javascript. Some of these tricks are useful. Others however go against standards, and some seriously go against maintainability. I'd be reluctant to give this book to my team. One may be tempted into shaving off bytes, spending a big effort and yet producing unmaintainable code. Unless one has a strong sense of relevance, one can be caught up in technical dispersion.
If you want to send fewer bytes, standard gzip-compression is far better than eliminating line-breaks and indentation.
The book does not go into server-side programming. It is oriented towards optimization of static pages.
With this orientation, King makes some bad recommendations. For example, he recommends writing javascript without comments, rather then recommending server-side comments that are not sent to the browser.
The book predates AJAX-like techniques.
Who should read it?
The book is useful for the person that writes the html that will be sent to the browser, if that person has a good sense of relevance.