Web Design

Wednesday, February 10 2010

Web Page Download Size

By Eric Maziade on Wednesday, February 10 2010, 16:41

I used to rely on http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com for analyzing under-performing web pages - and to heighten customer's awareness of the impact of file sizes and load times.

While the tool is great, I never actually took the time to see how well it did its job.

Here's my beef with it at this time:

It might not be smart enough in its CSS analysis - from what I understand, it will look for every image link in the CSS and count it - no matter if the image actually needs to be loaded.

I'd love to find a FireFox plugin that would use the browser's rendering engine to figure out what has been downloaded.

I tried to save to disk using the browser, but it does not always pick up the files linked by the CSS (both in IE and FireFox).

Anyone knows of good alternatives for this kind of analysis?

2 comments

Tuesday, April 8 2008

IE7 And '

By Eric Maziade on Tuesday, April 8 2008, 15:51

Well, I learned something today.

The XML entity "'" is not displayed properly under IE7. Instead of showing the single quote, as I would expect, it shows "'".

' works well under FireFox, IE6, IE5, Safari and Opera. But no longer under IE7.

The most understandable explanation I've found about this is that it is part of the XML standard and not HTML.

To which I would reply: yeah, but I'm doing XHTML.

To which I've read the insightful reply:

If you're doing XHTML, the world is not ready for you.

Another hilarious and insightful answer to the problem was :

Use ' instead of ' ?

So I'm resting from the shock and looking at my HTML transformation libraries wondering if there is a tsunami of problems that is waiting for me if I remove the conversion from single quote to the ' entity.

I really don't expect any troubles as we never used single quotes to delimit parameters within HTML and we never used the HTML transformation methods to send text to javascript.

Still, one wonders about the woodpeckers and civilization.

Maybe Microsoft will let out a patch?