September 2007
Intermediate to advanced
170 pages
4h 24m
English
Content preview from High Performance Web Sites
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Icing on the Cake
There are a couple other ways to squeeze waste out of your JavaScript.
Inline Scripts
The discussion thus far has focused on external JavaScript files. Inline JavaScript blocks should also be minified, though this practice is less evident on today's web sites. Table 12-4 shows that although 4 of the 10 top web sites minify their external scripts, only 3 minify their inline scripts.
Table 12-4. Inline minification practices across 10 top web sites
Web site | External scripts minified? | Inline scripts minified? |
|---|---|---|
no | no | |
no | no | |
no | no | |
yes | no | |
yes | yes | |
yes | yes | |
no | no | |
no | no | |
yes | yes | |
no | no |
In practice, minifying inline scripts is easier than minifying external scripts. Whatever page generation platform you use (PHP, Python, Perl CGI, etc.), there is probably a version of JSMin that can be integrated with it. Once the functionality is available, all inlined JavaScript can be minified before being echoed to the HTML document.
Gzip and Minification
Rule 4 stresses the importance of compressing content and recommends using gzip to accomplish this, resulting in a typical size reduction of 70%. Gzip compression decreases file sizes more than minification—that's why it's in Rule 4 and this is Rule 10. I've heard people question whether minification is even worthwhile if gzip compression has already been enabled. ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.