Hi Neil, > I think though, regardless of access speeds, the target size of pages has > rarely changed over the years - 40-60K per page (not including images but > ideall it will) with a 2-3 second page load.
Not necessarily. I've been doing some homework on this because I know we have clients that use dial-up, especially those that are overseas, and I want to keep the pages as small as possible. With so much client side code being added, the page bloat is tremendous and load times are increasing. I'm concerned that the attractiveness and ease of implementing desktop-like features is causing designers and developers to forget about who their target audience is. It used to be that we actually thought about that and worked hard to ensure good performance. Its appears, though, that this is becoming secondary to the "cool" factor because developers mistakenly believe that everyone is using broadband. I'm on broadband (3mbps) and you take the homepage of CNN.com, for example, and its 387k and a 13 second load time. Load that up via dialup and its conceivable to have a 20-30 second load time. CNN.com is, at least to me, an excellent example of a site that is specifically geared towards consumers but isn't doing the best job possible of optimizing their pages for those that don't have high-speed access. I recently raised a red flag on CF8's Ajax widgets and the huge page sizes that we being generated by doing the most rudimentary tasks which prompted Adobe to take a serious look into optimizing their implementations of YUI, Ext, and images. > Yes, if you know you audience are going to be using 56K modem speeds then > aim as low as that, but your sites will be pretty bare bones I am sure - > certainly no "RIA". I don't think you need to give up on RIA-type features. I just think people need to be smarter about how they do it. What I mean by this is that your choice of effects/JS/DOM libraries needs to be based on your application needs. If you know that you're going to build an application where you could limit 50% of your audience by using a large framework, then libs such as BackBase, Dojo, YUI, Ext or MochiKit may not be the best choice while jQuery, MooTools or Prototype, which are feature rich & compact, might be better suited. But if you know for fact that you're explicitly dealing with broadband users, then you have a lot more flexibility in your selection. It goes back to what I was saying that I'm concerned that developers are not thinking about their target audience when choosing how to build their apps. > Certainly large corp sites, including Adobes are aimed at higher broadband > speeds. I have a 15mb broadband line at home at it still loads dog slow! Yep, but Adobe did this because they know who the majority of their target audience is; designers and developers. I would venture to say that at least 80-90% of people that visit Adobe.com are on a broadband connection and I'm very confident Adobe is aware of that. Now, the fact that it loads slow using a broadband connection is a different issue and could be attributed to your geographic location. I hit their page and it loaded 358k in 4.45 seconds. Rey.. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| ColdFusion MX7 by Adobe® Dyncamically transform webcontent into Adobe PDF with new ColdFusion MX7. Free Trial. http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion?sdid=RVJV Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:281373 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
