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Comment by kadavy | Hacker News Reader

I realize Paul is doing it for the sake of learning, but that seems like an insane amount of consideration to display and bandwidth.

I remember seeing an article that argued that you should just serve up big images, and that slow cellular data networks scale down and optimize images pretty well already.

Basically it argued that it wasn't worth the trouble. Even with some Googling I can't seem to dig it up.

Thoughts on this, anyone?

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I began retina-ifying my website (http://betterexplained.com). I'm serving up the high-res images. Something like a logo should be downloaded once and cached for a long time.

I have a lot of LaTeX-generated images, which is too painful to set using CSS rules. Also, for RSS/email readers, they don't have the full stylesheet available (feed-to-email service), so I want the image dimensions specified via attributes, not CSS.

>Something like a logo should be downloaded once and cached for a long time.

The cache on mobile browsers is tiny (4-85MB), your logo will likely only be cached for that visit. I'm finding sites claiming IOS didn't even have a disk cache for safari until IOS 6? So in that case it is certainly only getting cached for one visit.

Interesting point, thanks for sharing. I might do CSS targeting for site-wide images, and leave the in-post images (i.e., the ones coming via email & rss) with the high-res versions.

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