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Comment by krakensden | Hacker News Reader

> Now, take away the constant loading of the JavaScript and CSS, and you've significantly decreased bandwidth and server load

On a related note, if this is a problem for you, now might be a good time to check your Expires headers. The 'some clients turn off caching' seems like a bit of a non sequitur too- some clients also have javascript disabled. Some clients are IE6. How many clients are like that in the wild? How many of /your/ users?

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The caching justification felt very contrived to me. I'd guess that the percentage of users with broken cache handling is lower than the percentage of users with javascript disabled. I'd rather not guess, but the author didn't provide any actual evidence that this is a problem.

If your cache headers are set incorrectly, you should probably fix that instead of reworking your entire site.

It's true that the caching argument seemed contrived (and was, in a sense), so I've added an edit to it to take your comments, as well as others, into consideration, and to make them known to other readers. Thanks for the feedback.

I agree, and that's kind of the point I was making towards the end. You need to know what your target audience is, and whether or not those are issues you might face. In either case, if you have a "DOM Heavy" application, you can still save bandwidth by not needing to send anything except the data across.

Yes, but if you want to be honest about numbers, you should say something like

Reddit.com HTML.: 37.6 KB Text in that HTML: 5.9 KB

(That's just what I got from copy+pasting.) The difference at issue is loading another 37.6 KB page versus loading whatever part of that 5.9 KB is the "interesting" text (i.e. probably not the header or footer) plus its links and styles and the overhead of whatever you want to stick it in (JSON, an HTML fragment, etc). The huge CSS and JS files are not reloaded every time you go to a new page.

That's a good point. The big issue is loading the "Heavy" part of the DOM every time (navigation links, header/footer, user panel, etc), rather than the real "content". I'll make an edit and make that a more prominent point. Thanks for the feedback. If you don't mind my asking, how did you pull the 5.9KB number out of the 37.6 one? Just checked the size of the interesting part of the page once saved into a new file?

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