Raible Designs

AVDI:  Yeah. If I pushed back a little, it’s only because I just wonder, are the improvements coming solely from the perspective of a Google or Facebook, or are they also coming from the perspective of the hundreds of thousands of people developing smaller applications and websites?

ILYA:  Yeah. So, I think it’s the latter, which is to say the primary objective here is actually to make the browsers faster. So, if you open a webpage over HTTP 2.0, it should load faster. And that’s one kind of population that will benefit from it. And the second one is actually developers. We want to make developing web applications easier. You shouldn’t have to worry about things like spriting and concatenating files and doing all this stuff, domain sharding and all this other mess, which are just completely unnecessary and actually makes performance worse in many cases because each one of those has negative repercussions.

Things like, let’s say concatenating your style sheets or JavaScript. Why do we do that? Well, we do that because we want to reduce the number of requests because we have this connection limit with HTTP 1.0. But the downside then is let’s say you’ve — actually Rails does this, you concatenate all of your CSS into one giant bundle. Great, we reduced the number of requests. We can download it faster. Awesome. Then you go in and your designer changes one line from whatever, the background color from blue to red. And now, you have to download the entire bundle. You have to invalidate that certain file and you need to download the whole thing.

Chances are, if you’re doing sound software development today, you already have things split into modules. Like here is my base.css, here is my other page.css. Here are my JavaScript modules. And there’s no reason why we need to concatenate those into one giant bundle and invalidate on every request. This is something that we’ve automated to some degree, but it’s unnecessary. And it actually slows down the browser, too, in unexpected ways.

We recently realized that serving these large JavaScript files actually hurts your performance because we can’t execute the JavaScript until we get the entire file. So, if you actually split it into a bunch of smaller chunks, it actually allows us to execute them incrementally, one chunk at a time. And that makes the site faster. Same thing for CSS, splitting all that stuff. And this may sound trivial, but in practice, it’s actually a giant pain for a lot of applications.

JAMES:  That seems really, really weird to me though. Everything has been moving in that direction and you’re saying our data on that’s just wrong. It’s not faster?

ILYA:  Yeah. Part of it is the connectivity profiles are also changing. So when we first started advocating for those sorts of changes back in, whatever it was, 2005, 2007, when this stuff started showing up, the connection speeds were different. We were primarily maybe DSL was state of the art and bandwidth was really an issue there. So, you spend more time just downloading resources. Now that bandwidth is much less of an issue, latency is the problem. And because of that, these “best practices” are changing. And with HTTP 2.0, you actually don’t have to do that at all. And in fact, some of those things will actually hurt your performance.