Re: [tlug] Acid drop on mobile?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Dave M G writes:

 > I have no idea. All I know (and not even for sure) is that internet 
 > usage on keitais is charged by packets.

Well, you should find out.  Suppose that they're pretty big, say 2KB.
That's a lot of kanji for a keitai.  I'm sure you can fit many or most
pages + their accompanying CSS in that.  So if it all goes into one
packet instead of two, you've cut your users packet costs in half.
The overhead of roundtripping requests is also halved.  Not to mention
doubling the speed of loading.

On the other hand, if they're small, 256 or 512 bytes, your users will
have to pay for several in any case.  You can cut the overhead (and
lags) of multiple requests, but the savings will be 20% instead of
50%.

 > Just HTML, CSS, and in rare cases when necessary, images.

Images (GIF/JPEG/PNG) won't gzip to speak of, of course.  It may be
possible to inline the data (like a MIME image in email) and save the
overhead, though.

gzip will help a lot with text, even if it's been squeezed in the way
I suggested.  And as Simon says, *if* you can be sure that most of the
time the phone does the decompression, you could just send the HTML
and the styles in one gzipped packet and win big.  But you do need to
find out which phones can do that; if it's done by the gateways
(Curt's point) you aren't going to win anything by gzipping alone.