On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Andrew Garrett<agarrett(a)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.