Monthly Archives: May 2016

Save 24% With The Last Frontier of Minification: HTML!

As a web developer, front end developer, or web performance enthusiast (or all of those), it’s likely that you’re already minifying your JavaScript (or uglifying it) and most likely your css too.

Why do we do this?

We minify specifically to reduce the bytes going over the wire; trying to get our websites as tiny as possible in order to shoot them through the internet faster than our competitor’s.

We obsess over optimising our images, carefully choosing the appropriate format and tweaking the quality percentage, hoping to achieve the balance between clarity and file size.

So we have teeny tiny JavaScript; we have clean, minified, uncssed css; we have perfectly small images (being lazy loaded, no doubt).

So what’s left?…

The ever-overlooked … HTML minification!

Thats right! HTML! BOOM!

Seriously though; HTML may be the one remaining frontier for optimisation. If you’ve covered off all the other static files – the css, js, and images – then not optimising html seems like a wasted opportunity.

If you view the source of most websites you visit you’ll probably find line after line of white space, acres of indents, reams of padding, novels in the forms of comments.

Every single one of these is a wasted opportunity to save bytes; to squeeze the last few bits out of your HTTP response, turning it from a hulking oil tanker into a zippy land speeder.

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Getting Browser Location in Chrome and Deprecating Powerful Features on Insecure Origins

A while ago I created the most useful web page I’ve ever written; an extremely basic page to list the bus arrival times, based on your current location anywhere in London!

I have used this page several times a day on an almost daily basis since I created it, as does my wife; every morning we need to know when the next bus will arrive near our house in order to know when to rush out with our children to take them to school.

I used it every morning to check if I needed to rush out the door to catch the rare “express” bus that would get me to the tube much quicker than the usual one.

I discovered just how useful it is whilst in a pub, deciding whether I had time for another drink before heading home; a quick glance at my phone and I could find out that the next bus home wasn’t for 20 minutes – plenty of time!

However, recently it stopped working for me. It still worked just fine on my wife’s iPhone (and hence Safari), but not on my Nexus (Chrome). It works on my laptop too, or at least appeared to.

So what’s going on?

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Lazy Loading Images? Don’t Rely On JavaScript!

So much of the internet is now made up of pages containing loads of images; just visit your favourite shopping site and scroll through a product listing page for an example of this.

As you can probably imagine, bringing in all of these images when the page loads can add unnecessary bloat, causing the user to download lots of data they may not see. It can also make the page slow to interact with, due to the page layout constantly changing as new images load in, causing the browser to reprocess the page.

One popular method to deal with this is to “Lazy Load” the images; that is, to only load the images just before the user will need to see them.

If this technique is applied to the “above the fold” content – i.e., the first average viewport-sized section of the page – then the user can get a significantly faster first view experience.

So everyone should always do this, right?

Before we get on to that, let’s look at how this is usually achieved. It’s so easy to find a suitable jQuery plugin or angularjs module that a simple install command later and you’re almost done; just add a new attribute to image tags or JavaScript method to process the images you want to delay loading for.

So surely this is a no-brainer?

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