I thought the list might be interested in some research I recently did.
First of all, I was creating a web page size checker in Perl. This fetches the page, then any associated images, and adds the size of them. So far, so HTML 3.2.
But these days of course it has to fetch the associated CSS files and add them -- but wait, there's more, as they say, it should also fetch any images called by the style sheet and add them to the total.
Which is when the question arose, what is the actual size of a web page?
If I have three pages, each with a different background image, but sharing a common style sheet, that means my script will count all three images as part of the total, because at the moment, I haven't been able to parse the CSS and count only the images *used* on the page, I just total up the size of all images.
So, the question is, what does the browser actually do? Three developers, discussing this, came up with different answers.
Does it download only the images required for that page, download all images, or does it download the ones needed right away and the others in the background?
As I say, I've done some research on this, and I'll let you know what I found out in a second email a bit later, but I thought I'd raise the question for your interest/discussion first.
------------------------------------------------------------ "Have You Validated Your Code?" John Horner (+612 / 02) 9333 2110 Senior Developer, ABC Online http://www.abc.net.au/ ------------------------------------------------------------
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