On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 4:41 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
* Removes a few RTTs for non-pipelining clients
Do you mean to imply that there's such a thing as a pipelining client on the real web? (Okay, okay, Opera.) This concern seems like it outweighs all the others put together pretty handily -- especially for script files that aren't at the end, which block page loading.
- Automatically create CSS sprites?
That would be neat, but perhaps a bit tricky.
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Also take into account on the javascript redesign, javascript wiki-side extensions.
[[MediaWiki:Common.js]] importScripts [[MediaWiki:Wikiminiatlas.js]], [[MediaWiki:niceGalleries.js]] and [[MediaWiki:buttonForRFA.js]], which then load [[MediaWiki:buttonForRFA/lang.js]]... plus the several Gadgets the user may have enabled.
On Wikimedia Commons I load 38 scripts located at the MediaWiki namespace (plus gen=js). I'm pretty sure loading all of them when they aren't in the cache slows it much more than the organization of the core mediawiki javascript.
Hmm, yeah. This scheme needs to support combining admin-added JavaScript, unless we can convince everyone to just put everything in Common.css. Maybe we could support some sort of transclusion mechanism for JS files -- like rather than serving JS pages raw, MW first substitutes templates (but nothing else)?
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Tei oscar.vives@gmail.com wrote:
I see that ImageMagick can combine images in a single one.
A single image mean a single hit to a Apache, so it only have to spawn once.
On the clientside, a single image can draw multiple elements with some ninja CSS stuff. ( background-position?).
For such thing to be possible to a MediaWiki skins, do changes are needed?.
This is image spriting, which Tim mentioned as a possibility. It's not a big issue for us right now because we use so few images, and images don't block page parsing or rendering, but it might be worth considering eventually.
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 10:13 AM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think it fits our normal image usage into the pages. Could be tried for the images used by the skins. Although I would worry about support for that CSS on legacy browsers.
Image spriting is very well-studied and works in all browsers of import. It's used by all the fancy high-performance sites, like Google:
http://www.google.com/images/nav_logo7.png
It would be nice if we didn't have to go to such lengths to hack around the fact that HTTP pipelining is broken, wouldn't it?