[Foundation-l] Usability: page weight

[Roan Kattouw]

Ryan Lomonaco <wiki.ral315 at ...> writes:
> Page weight is a major hurdle for working on any Wikimedia sites
> affecting users who do not enjoy a broadband connection.
> And I believe that small wikis with non-European languages are more
> affected than others (a study would be interesting here).
> For improving outreach of Wikimedia outside of the Western world,
> improving the page weight should be a priority.
> 
> What can be done?
> 
Next week, work will start on a project called the "Resource Loader" (formerly
known as script loader or maybe as part of JS2) that will optimize loading of
resources like CSS and JavaScript. In particular, that means we'll no longer
throw more than 100 KB of JS+CSS in your face then decide you're on an old
unsupported browser and not use any of it.

As I said, work on this resource loader has yet to get started, so it'll take
some time to be finished and used in production; I can't really say when that
will be, but rest assured that an elegant permanent solution is in the works. As
for permanent solutions: I've delayed loading the JS for jQuery UI with a dirty
hack; this saves a good 10% off of the initial JS load, IIRC. This was done to
stop old versions of Netscape from crashing, but it helps reduce the initial
page load JS size as well.

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)