Making Faster Web Pages

"... new CSS 3.0 features can help create lightweight pages by providing built-in support for gradients, rounded borders, shadows, animations, transitions, and other graphical effects that previously required images to be loaded." Rules for Mobile Performance Optimization by Tammy Everts, August 2013, Communications Of The ACM.

That's just one of many dozens of optimization tips, hints and ideas contained in an article with a really bad title: "Rules for Mobile Performance Optimization".

First of all, the article is all about web page optimization, nothing about hardware, not even apps.

Second, it isn't just about mobile web pages, the article applies to tethered desktop performance as well. Yes, there's stuff about optimizing m. websites, but much much more about web pages in general.

The Title Is Not Important

What's important is that the tips and ideas apply to websites served up by SQL Anywhere's built-in HTTP server, and that's why it's important to readers of this blog.

Here are a few tidbits from the article...

• Concentrate on reducing the number of HTTP requests, reducing the size of responses and optimizing client-side code.
  

• Embed scripts and images for first-time loading.
  

• Compress images, scripts and CSS.
  

• Minify scripts (just like we did with BASICA in 1981 :)
  

• Resize images to match the display size.
  

• Simplify pages with new HTML5 features.
  

• Simplify pages with new CSS3 features.
  

• Defer rendering below-the-fold images.
  

• Defer loading scripts.
  

Guaranteed, there's stuff in this article you haven't thought of, stuff you've never heard of, and stuff you'll want to try... right now (like CSS3 features) or in the future (HTTP2).

Oh, About Those New Features...

Here are two websites mentioned in the article:

• caniuse.com - Compatibility tables for support of HTML5, CSS3, SVG and more in desktop and mobile browsers
  

• mobilehtml5.org - HTML5 compatibility on mobile and tablet browsers with testing on real devices
  

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