CODEWITHSUNDEEP
imagehttprequestminifyimage-resizing
tim peterson
tim peterson

Reputation: 24315

Why worry about minifying JS and CSS when images are typically the largest sized HTTP request?

I think my question says it all. With many successful sites using lots of user inputted images (e.g., Instagram), it just seems, in my perhaps naive opinion, that source code minification might be missing the boat.

Regardless of the devices one is coding for (mobile/desktop/both), wouldn't developers time be better spent worrying about the images they are serving up rather than their code sizes?

For optimizing for mobile browsers slower speeds, I was thinking it would probably be best to have multiple sized images and write code to serve up the smallest ones if the user is on a phone.

Does that sound reasonable?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 561

Answers (2)

Brad
Brad

Reputation: 163438

100KB of data for a medium-sized JS library is no light-weight. You should optimize your site as best as possible. If by minifying a script you can get it to half of its size, and then by gzipping it, save another third, why wouldn't you?

I don't know how you do your minifying, but there are many scripts that automate the process, and will often bundle all of your JS into one package on the fly. This saves bandwidth, and hassle.

My philosophy is always "use what you need". If it is possible to save bandwidth for you and your users without compromising anything, then do it. If you can compress your images way down and they still look good, then do it. Likewise, if you have some feature that your web application absolutely must have, and it takes quite a bit of space, use it anyway.

Upvotes: 1

Spencer Ruport
Spencer Ruport

Reputation: 35117

First, I don't know that many developers do "worry" about minification of scripts. Plenty of public facing websites don't bother.

Second, minification is the removal of unnecessary whitespace whereas decreasing the size of an image usually entails reducing it's quality so there is some difference.

Third, I believe that if it weren't so easy to implement a minification step into a deployment process it would be even less popular. It doesn't save much bandwidth true but if all it takes is a few minutes to configure a deployment script to do it then why not?

Upvotes: 3

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