Speed is a fundamental aesthetic in Web design. One of the
biggest Web myths is that you can't design well without high
bandwidth.
Everyone talks about what the Web will look like when we
all have cable modems or fiber optic cables in our living
rooms. Frankly, I couldn't care less. Annotated video and
streaming CD-quality music will be interesting, I'm sure.
But it's much more interesting to look at the emerging
design solutions to the problem of extreme bandwidth
limitations. With the emergence of technologies like Cascading
Stylesheets (CSS), which offer advanced typographic and layout
control as a layer on top of HTML, we see designers being able
to do far more with less.
Before the advent of CSS, a headline would be made into a
graphic to give your page the desired look, which wastes
bandwidth, but now CSS offers the ability to select type
style, precise size, and leading for regular text, as well as
exact placement on the screen. New vector graphics formats
like Macromedia's Flash enable tiny images to scale to any
size without quality degradation. Downloadable fonts send only
the characters needed for a given page. All of these things
are combining to advance the Web as a medium; all are fueled
by a lack of bandwidth.
But you can make your pages as fast as possible without
having to rely on all these technological advances. Instead,
by using a few simple techniques, you can make your pages much
more manageable to your modem-based audience.
Cybrarian uses HTML, not images, to combine navigation
with speed.
Graphics, for example, can be designed to exploit both the
characteristics of HTTP servers and the benefits of
compressions schemes. Many small images combined into one,
like the toolbar on the Webmonkey
frontdoor, will load much faster than a group of smaller,
individual images.
This is because every time your browser asks for another
image from a Web server, the two need to communicate about the
connection. This exchange slows down your browser
considerably. But by grouping many small icons and images
together and using an image map for navigation, you'll make
your page load faster even though the file size may become
larger.
Similarly, knowing when to use a JPEG versus a GIF, and how
to design the images to make the most of their various
compression schemes, will arm any designer with the power
needed to develop blazing sites.
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