Question

I am interested to know about the possibilities of reducing http requests on servers by sending different kind of contents in a single compressed files and later uncompress on client’s browser and place the stuff(images,css,js) where it should be.

I read somewhere that firefox is working on plan to give such features in future releases but it has not been done yet plus it would not be a standard version.

Will you guys suggest any solution for this?can Flash be used to uncompress compressed files on client side for later use?

Thanks

Answer 1

We did more or less what you describe in our web an are extremely happy of the response time.

The original files are all separated (HTML, CSS, JS, images) and we develop on them.
Then when moving to production we have a shell script that:

• use YUI compressor to compress CSS and JS
• all images are read and converted to data:image/png;base64,...
• all blank spaces and comments are removed from the HTML
• all these resources are put inline in the HTML

The page is ~300kb and usually cached.
The server gzip it, the real size travelling the network is then lower.
We don’t use any additional compression.

And then there is a second call to get the data(JSON for us) and start rendering it client side.