Reginald Mullin

If you were given a dollar by every website that transferred unnecessary metadata to you, you'd be richer than Bill Gates!  Well, not really; but you'd at least be well off.  You see, very few people realize that the websites they visit on a daily basis are transferring useless metadata to them -- including seasoned website developers, designers, and marketers.  And, even when people do realize it, they often assume that it's a best practice.  It's not!  In fact, it's one of the reasons why the web has become such a bloated medium.  Well, that and images, stylesheets, javascript, fonts, etc. -- all of which are even bigger culprits than metadata.  Still, that's no reason to ignore metadata -- it's been ignored for far too long!  Thus, in this article, I'll shed some light on the problem of transferring unnecessary metadata on the web as well as discuss several solutions for dealing with it. What is metadata? According to Wikipedia , metadata r...

You've seen them before... those exceedingly long URLs of static resources on websites.  No?  Well, just view-source on your favorite website or copy & paste the address of a static resource from Google to see the problem for yourself.  Done?  You've probably noticed that the most ubiquitous examples by far are those of images -- many of which have cryptic URLs like " /images/G/01/gno/sprites/nav-sprite-global_bluebeacon-V3-1x_optimized._CB516556901_.png " and " /v/c/assets/navigation/image/drawer-sunwear/21/edee9f4c82.jpg " or even " assets/images/homepage/top/navigation/cart-icon.jpg ".  But the problem isn't limited to just images; there are other media types with exceedingly long URLs too, i.e. video, audio, CSS, JS, etc. When did this trend start? Over the past few years, it seems, the web has Gone Wild with exceedingly long URLs; or, perhaps it's website developers and designers who've gotten lax about their craft.  But wh...

According to the HTTPArchive , the average transfer size of all HTML responses for a single website is 50kB.  That's not much -- especially when compared to the size of JS, CSS, image, or even font resources -- but those 50kB nonetheless add to the ever increasing bloat of webpages.  Bloated webpages   make websites dreadfully slow, and even a minor increase in load time can cause a significant decrease in sales, according to both  Google and Amazon .  So HTML transfer size matters; it's an important metric to pay attention to and to reduce.  That's why I'll be focusing on several ways in which to reduce that 50kb number in this article. To begin, let's take a look at a few websites. A cursory check of the top 500 websites  shows that they contain dozens of useless tags that neither add value to end-users nor to browsers tasked with rendering them.  A case in point is the  Engadget  website, which can be inspected by right-cl...