Someone once said to me "this will be a moot point by 2008" - but I totally disagreed with them. Yes countries like the UK, USA, Canada and Japan may have > 80% coverage and > 50% subscription rates, but in these countries as you say there are still a large proportion of users on dialup.
Many people here in UK cannot get speeds of > 2Mbps (now considered the minimum broadband level) - I'm lucky if I hit 4Mbps on my line, and my work is still on a 1Mbps ADSL line shared between the whole office of 15 people. And don't even get me started on the emerging markets in Africa and South America...... I've was taught that a start page should be no larger than 500kb in size, and for Apple to have >700k in just JS, that's just silly. And to top it off...Apple have released Safari on Windows - yet another browser to saturate an already crowded market where no one browser is standards complant and it just makes more work for us developers. Anyway, my point I'm making is that jQuery is almost perfect as it is, and I wouldn't want it to be bloated, but there is leaway to increase its size a little and still be able to provide highly optimised sites. If jQuery is one of the slowest libraries out there, then it SHOULD be optimised - newcomers are going to look at there figures and make a decision on it - good or bad. But by providing the middle ground of maybe being one of the faster ones but still being smaller than fastest lib, then maybe more people will consider using it. My 2p On 6/12/07, Priest, James (NIH/NIEHS) [C] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> -----Original Message----- > From: Andy Matthews [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > I would guess that most (at least a large percentage) of their target > audience has broadband. Last weekend I was over a friends house with dial-up and I was amazed at how completely unusable the web was for me... Gmail, my local weather site, news - all took forever to load up... I no longer develop public facing sites - but if it's been awhile since you've tried surfing with a modem - I'd give it a try now and then just to remember what a majority of people are experiencing on the web... Sept 2006: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/09/jd_power_high_speed.html "The study finds that 56 percent of residential ISP customers subscribe to high-speed Internet service -- an increase of 11 percentage points from 2005." So I'm guessing in 07 you are still looking at 40%+ using dialup. That said - I'd vote for smaller file sizes... Jim "There is more to life than simply increasing its speed." ~Gandhi
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