On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Andrew Garrettagarrett@wikimedia.org wrote:
The slowest connection I can possibly imagine you using is 14.4 kB/s.
That's twice as fast as the theoretical maximum speed of a 56 Kbps modem, and probably three or four times as fast as a 56 Kbps modem in practice.
At this rate, you could still download fifteen unnecessary tooltips per second (with the perhaps unjustified assumption that there are few tooltips over 1kB).
If you cut that down to five per second (about 56 Kbps speed), then you're talking about easily half a second extra for pages with a few large tooltips. Although after gzip it's probably more like, say, a tenth of a second? Nothing to sneeze at, anyway.
Cutting out unnecessary HTML does make a difference, especially to users with slow connections. Removing tooltips alone isn't going to change much, but every bit is an improvement. I bet we could cut out 10% of the size of an average page if we refactored the markup without removing anything useful.
This is all beside the point, though, since the tooltips are completely pointless and should be removed on that grounds alone.