80-20 Rule For Optimizing Web Pages

Tenni Theurer has a post regarding performance on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog. Tenni clarifies that performance finds place in the UI blog because web page performance is affected by the user interface design and development. The conclusion is that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on the response time. Typically the browser makes a separate HTTP request per component (images, scripts, stylesheets, …, anything other than HTML) in the page. This is one of the reasons why a lot of tools that analyze the sites look at the number of images, scripts and stylesheets are required for displaying a page. A good article, in fact, it is going to be a good series to follow.