Release It!

9.5 Wasted Space in HTML

I’ve seen a lot of bad things justified with arguments that “bandwidth is cheap” and “CPU is cheap.” As you saw in ​Myths About Capacity​, neither statement is true. You should not excuse inefficiency.

Web applications harbor a lot of inefficiency that makes users suffer every day. Suppose a page could be reduced from 200KB to 150KB—not an uncommon reduction, by the way. That’s 25% fewer bytes the user has to download. Those 50KB take ten seconds on an average dial-up connection. The extra bytes matter for broadband users, too. Here’s why.

The application server uses CPU cycles to generate those ...