Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

I agree with all the points except for "Obsessively compress your images". The same argument as point 2 ("Don't minimize that HTML") applies: It's an extra step in the queue, and you lose some quality in the result.

Besides, bandwidth and storage will only get cheaper. Unless you have a site that contains thousands or more images, chances are you won't really notice the difference the compression makes.

Maybe for preservation we should even go in the other direction instead: Make every image a link to a full-size non-resized version of the image with optimum quality.

View on HN

I disagree, image compression is still highly relevant and will stay relevant for a long time. It’s not about hosting costs and hosting bandwidth, it’s about user bandwidth.

I frequently travel between countries by train and bus and when outside cities it’s almost impossible to get any non-optimized page to load. And this doesn’t even only extend to the time spent inside the train. Depending on the country (all developed) and which phone operator my phone decides to switch to, I have slow mobile internet about half of the time. This is also one of the reasons why I prefer to read HN over other sites: HN loads, others don’t.

Most images on a modern website don’t really contribute anything substantial but are merely decorative. Image quality loss should therefore not be a problem for ~90% of images.

Compare the available mobile bandwidth and cost today with what we had just 5 years ago. We're talking about regular web pages here. Sure, you don't want to put full resolution images straight into your page. That makes no sense. But if you have a regular page with a couple of images, its size up to a certain size won't matter in most places in a few more years, just as it doesn't matter today if you live in a more densely populated area. I have a mobile phone contract where I get 10GB of traffic (which seems a lot to me but which is laughable if you compare it to other markets such as Kuwait where contracts with 1TB/month are normal) for less than 20€ per month and I only manage to use 3GB per month or so most of the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com