Web Development·12,052 discussions

Download time of a webpage

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Hi,

Suppose I have a webpage , One time I set an Image as an image in the page and another time I set it as a background image. If all other specs are the same, will there be any differences between the download time of the page?

thanks for your input

Topic

Can’t imagine why there

In reply to Download time of a webpage

would be a difference in the time to download. If’s in the cache it’s no time at all after all.
Rendering said image is of course a very different matter.

I can..

In reply to Can’t imagine why there

if you image map the image then you have all the extra code, which can slow down download times.

if you are crazy enough to use an imagmap site on a 28.8 dialup then it’s gonna take forever.

and yes, I have seen that last, from a website designer yet.. 15 minutes to download front page of website. cause of a tiff imagemap.
I sent him an email, pointing out that the huge imagemap file, with the horendous download time are excellent arguements to not hire him to build a site, keep up the good work, my business is booming.

~l~

never heard back from him.

Erh he asked

In reply to I can..

as a background or an image tag.
No difference in download time, of course whether he’s talking the time to actually transfer the file vs the time to download and render it is currently an open question.

Reply To: Download time of a webpage

In reply to Erh he asked

@ Jaqui: LOL..that was a nice story. and no I do not want to image map the image.

@Toni, what I mean is downloading the webpage not the image.

Who’s Toni ??

In reply to Reply To: Download time of a webpage

The time to download any web page, depends on the volume of information, the speed of the connections and possibly the number of places the content is sourced from.
I suspect though you ara talking about the time you make the request, to it completely displaying in your browser window though ?

Reply To: Download time of a webpage

In reply to Who’s Toni ??

[Quote=”Tony Hopkins”]Who’s TOni??[/quote]

oops! sorry about that. I appologize. 🙂

[Quote=”Tony Hopkins”]I suspect though you ara talking about the time you make the request, to it completely displaying in your browser window though ?[/quote]

Yes that is right.

if it’s

In reply to Reply To: Download time of a webpage

the exact same image file then there will be no difference in download time.

AS Jaqui said

In reply to Reply To: Download time of a webpage

no difference in download times. Rendering times is different thoough.
If you had two pages one with the image as background and one with just one image tag, then it depends on how the image is drawn on the page.
Essentially if the image is resized, or tiled in the case on background dpending on how much of a change is involved will have an impact.
An image tag with a height and width exactly that of the image vs say it being stretched to fit the size of the window in a background property could involve a fair amount of pre-processing.
When a browser renders, the more information you can give it in terms of the size and the position of the elements the less work the renderer has to do. When you give a size even with some stretching to do, the browser can allocate space for it and then continue building the page while waiting for the image to arrive, if you don’t give it one, then it has to wait for the image to be downloaded so it can know the size and allocate the space.
Sticking a 50k jpg on your page is bad idea, 50 1k ones with without size information is worse.

I know…

In reply to Erh he asked

but it does have a slight relevancy. as when you use an image as background you tend to start adding more content on top, since the image isn’t taking up page space any more.

the “extra” data can slow it down.

it’s also a funny story, that helps people to remember to look at the hardware details in a site design, if the client is going to host on a dialup box in thier office, then smaller and lighter files will offset the slow connection.
basic site rather than multimedia.

( good example of site design not working right:

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/

the discussion forums there specially.. even with high speed connection 5 to 10 minutes for page refresh )

Reply To: Download time of a webpage

In reply to I know…

Well I will not add any extra data and actually I am looking for a way to bring down the download time of a webpage to make it faster to download when browsing it with dialup connection.

That is why I opened this thread to see if a bgimage will make any difference. I actually hade posted another thread up here about converting JPEG and other image files to html. I did alot of search unfortunately There is nothing like that (there is but the quality is very poor). Maybe in the future somebody will come up with a program for this purpose.

BTW the link that you provided works fine for me. I am using high speed though, I could download it almost instantly.

you could

In reply to Reply To: Download time of a webpage

try using gifs, or pngs instead of jjpegs, they both are palletted and are smaller image sizes with minor reduction in image quality. ( higher pallete numbers make better quality but larger images. )
another idea would be to use xhtml, which is the actual standard now, xml and html combined, using css, and a lot of the content only plain text files, look being in the css and markup rather than all in one.
w3c.org has the specs, and links to tuts for using xhtml, as well as the dtd for site validation.

linux format itself isn’t bad, join the free forums for a bit, by the fith or sixth page it really does bog down, even on high speed. ( it’s actually frequently complained about in thier forums )

Reply To: Download time of a webpage

In reply to you could

yes that is a good idea to use gifs or pngs but I will have to see if the quality is acceptable.
Inregards to CSS, I am doing my design now using css mostly (waiting for IE7 come out at the end of this year), specially menu buttons and breadcrumbs are css animated buttons and are not pictures, and all the attributes are kept in a css file in the root. This will help alot to bring down the page size. I do avoid using tables and frames as much as I can however I do not limit myself and incase I need I will use them.

I do avoid using javascripts too and instead I am using different tags such as tag and mouseover events for example to make a scrolling text.

and inregards to the xhtml, I used to do my html very nicely and almost like xhtml, and yes I will design in xhtml which is very better and also very simple with not alot of differences comparing to html.

I don’t have any Idea about linux so I will keep it for the future.

Download time independent of nature of content.

In reply to Download time of a webpage

All else being equal, any 2 files of precisely the same size will require equal times for downloading.

Rendering time, which is also of great import, [b]is[/b] dependent upon the file content.

From the viewer’s perspective, the 2 are inseparable, such that both must be minimized.

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In reply to Download time independent of nature of content.

thanks alot for your message.

You’re quite welcome.

In reply to Reply To: Download time of a webpage

There are all too many who not only fail to understand such basic issues as those raised here, but insist that they’re unimportant!

[Author]

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