Front End Load Speed improvements

[topdown]

As discussed here viewtopic.php?f=75&t=32880 CSS Sprites

Extending on it a bit
This is a must, the current load speed for the index and other pages with icons would be greatly improved.
For instance here there are 28 http requests that could easily be
1 CSS file
1 logo
1 background repeats
1 icons
1 buttons file
1 page request
1 javascript if needed.

Realistically the icons and buttons could be combined and maybe should be.

There should be 3 compilers and compression, one for my_style/theme/images/ one for my_style/theme/*.css and one for my_style/js/*.js

A general js directory for javascripts in the styles/style_name/ files with the js extension in this directory should be compiled into one.

Same with the CSS.

Then as mentioned by evil in the other topic, settings for these features to turn on and off and maybe even depth or excludes.

So I believe this should be looked at as a entire project of [ Loading Improvements ] and not just CSS sprites.

[GravityDK]

I like these ideas. Speed improvements are really important.

[Jhong]

I'm not sure if a single, monolithic JS file is very do-able. It would make MODDing harder. What would likely happen is that the file would get constantly recompiled whenever a MOD needed to change the execution order of JS or add a snippet based on a new activity on the current page. (in addition to dynamic JS which would need to be inline or on a separate PHP page).

In this situation, a base JS library (or two), with smaller optional JS files might end up being higher performance than a single one.

Nothing beats real-world testing though.