On 7/20/06, Alex Foley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The problem is my main page is the heaviest of the pages...it carries a > large Flash graphic (although that would soon go away...). One thing > I've decided on is that the user downloading a separate stylesheet for > each page is no good... I have always maintained individual CSS files to > avoid the one large file...possibly assembling this dynamically at the > start would solve this problem. Are there any negatives to a client > downloading a 10-12K stylesheet right away? Perhaps the answer is to > give them the minimum on the main page, but on any other page serve them > the full CSS...
Hi, Alex, We ran into this same question when we redesigned our site. We split up our stylesheets into three basic sheets -- 1 that provided the basic layout, 1 that provided the standard content ornamentation (for data tables and such) and 1 for small, page-specific elements (like an ornament for a specific article). We also had specialized sheets for sections of the site, like the account area, that shared a lot of common styles not used elsewhere, and other sheets to support less CSS-complete browsers (IE 6, IE 5, IE Mac, etc). We found that multiple files wasn't that big a deal (multiple meaning 4 or 5, not dozens), because current browsers and servers support HTTP pipelining, which lets the site send multiple files in one connection. (IE 5+ mac and pc, Safari, Firefox, NS 7+ all support pipelining. I assume Opera 7+ does also.) When we did our speed tests, however, our basic style sheet load ended up being about 25K, and IE 6 had to download close to 37K. This included a home page-specific sheet named home.css, that was an additional 5K. The business managers felt that this would be too great an up-front hit for folks on IE on dial-up. (We get around 2,000,000 visits per month, so we can't ignore the 30% remaining on dial-up.) To resolve this, we removed the main stylesheet, the content ornamentation stylesheet, and the IE-fix stylesheets from the home page, and increased the size of home.css to included the bare minimum of main.css, content.css and filtered rules from the IE-fix stylesheets to get the home page to work. This let us get down to about 20K, total, for the home page. By keeping layout.css in the mix, it let us start the caching process for most browsers, so that 10K was being cached in the first hit, reducing the second hit when the rest of the CSS got loaded. It also helped that we could set our servers to GZIP our CSS files, so that the load became that much smaller. Long story short, the majority of your browser population will support HTTP pipelining, so the number of files is less important than the size of the files. Finding ways to spread your big files across multiple pages can help also. Also consider that if you have a script tag in your head tag, the content of your site won't begin to appear until the stylesheet loads. So on that first hit, you can assume that the 10-12K download will be hidden in the time the user is waiting for the browser to contact the site. 10K on a 56kbps modem is about 2 seconds. If you are downloading, say, 30 or 50K of stuff in the head tag, then it's time to start worrying. 10K shouldn't be too bad. HTH, Michael ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d IE7b2 testing hub -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=IE7 List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
