On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 8:37 AM, Roan Kattouw
<roan.kattouw(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2009/6/23 Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com>om>:
Also, for inline images without explicitly
defined tooltips, the
image name is used as the tooltip even though it
is also shown in
the URL
when mousing over the image. Neither of these automatic tooltips
are really
useful, and they slow down page load time on image-heavy pages.
They might not be useful for you, but they are useful for others. On
what basis do you say they slow down page load time? I would be
surprised to find that supplying or not supplying alt text made any
difference.
You're right, this sounds like absolute nonsense. The time it takes
to
set and/or display these tooltips is nothing compared to the time it
takes to download and display the images themselves. Image-heavy
pages
load slowly because they contain a lot of images (surprise!), most
other factors are negligible.
I thought someone might say that. Perhaps I care more about
performance because I've had to endure several insufferably slow
connections, and I don't want to waste limited bandwidth downloading
redundant tooltips. Sometimes I even turn images off to improve speed,
but the tooltips, as part of the page, must still be downloaded.
The slowest connection I can possibly imagine you using is 14.4 kB/s.
At this rate, you could still download fifteen unnecessary tooltips
per second (with the perhaps unjustified assumption that there are few
tooltips over 1kB).
--
Andrew Garrett
Contract Developer, Wikimedia Foundation
agarrett(a)wikimedia.org