Responsible Responsive Design

4. Delivering Responsibly

Now that we’ve prepared our files for production, let’s examine how to responsibly deliver them: HTML, CSS, images, fonts, and JavaScript.

Delivering HTML

Earlier, we learned that the average website today weighs around 1.7 megabytes. Of that weight HTML contributes a relatively small share, about 55 kilobytes, but its size doesn’t tell the entire story of its impact on perceived and total load time. As with most client-side technologies, every line of HTML carries the possibility of references to external assets that must be requested over a network (like images and video), each with its own size and timing implications.

Mobile-first content

In Luke Wroblewski’s 2009 post “Mobile First” (which preceded his A Book ...