Video: Optimising websites for graphics

[covoxer]

All in all, the war of formats is near to an end. With todays connect speeds, storage spaces, when it's considered a norm to watch video stream online, the compression issues and choice is slowly getting irrelevant.
Sorry for OT. Guess it's my nostalgy for the times when smart selection between GIF and JPG, number of colors for GIF and level of compression for JPG was crucial to make site usable at all. As of today, you can export entire page as a single 32bit PNG and it will load in a couple of seconds. Back then we could wait longer to load sole HTML.

[Soquili]

The days when a 75 baud dumb terminal was the norm for ARPANET. Now that was slow. A 300 baud dial-up connection seemed blazing fast when it became feasible.

[Xhris]

I personally don't like it when people stop aspiring to being efficient (when it's practical to do so) simply because things are 'so powerful' that the benefits are lessened, and there's an excuse to cut corners. It's a good job Xara don't take that attitude, or it'd perform like Illustrator. In fact that's a good example of where the 'technology is too fast to bother being efficient' mentality shows it's flaws. Even with a high bandwidth internet connection, unnecessarily-png heavy sites are noticeably slower to download, as has been pointed out time and time again on the 'show us your sites' thread in constructive feedback. It may not affect navigation to the point of defeating the purpose of making the site in the first place, but it does, I hate to say, scream amateurism or carelessness (I'm not accusing people of being amateurs specifically, so, for the hypersensitive, please don't choose to get offended). Sites that approach being professional in presentation (which indicates caring and passion for your own work) are optimised to ensure the best experience for the user. Which means using the smaller JPEG format when appropriate instead of just PNG-ing everything outright. Although, as I mentioned in post 1, PNGs may end up inadvertently being generated simply because it's not clear to the designer that they are going to be generated on export, and experience and education help with this (hence my efforts). I tend to give the html_files folder a quick look before uploading to ensure there are no huge PNGs--which is another tip for anyone reading.