Re: Ten ways to speed up the download time of your website

On 16:02:52 16 July 2004 Dan Zambonini wrote:

There is sometimes a significant delay caused by this, though.  I’ve experienced it at least once - I’m not sure if it was the application or the server causing the problem, but there was a link where you had to log in to(using .htaccess type system), and if you went to:
domain.com/logindir

That could be anything - looking at the kind of things that have to be done on client and server sides the difference should be margins (nano-seconds). I can't see reasons why its slower _sometimes_ apart from weird bugs or other factors that affect the system (many programs run in parallel on modern PCs).

I am prepared to give it some automated testing by pulling X pages from variety of webservers to prove the point. Now that would not be testing of what happens on client side (browser), but it should definately show whether it matters for server (which I think it won't).

it would prompt you for the username/password, then forward you to the URL with the / at the end, and you’d have to enter the un/pw again...  This was probably an application-design issue, but linking to the logindir/ version was always quicker...

Well, most people (myself included) use IE 5.x+, there will be some weird apps that might expect / at the end and get confused when its not there, but I don't think its that critical to optimise for marginal apps, even though I agree that stylewise its not a bad idea to have /'s at the end of directory URLs.

Yes - but you’ve just made the point FOR css!  The whole point of semantic mark-up, and using CSS for presentation, is that automated bots can understand the contents/data of the web without having to wade through presenational data. 

Oh, bad eyes on Friday afternoon! In the context of layout I agree that its best to try to avoid using tables, however other usages of tables such as presenting inherently tabular information is best done with tables. Would be good if  Trenton posted example of CSS usage in tables-for-presentation context.