Back in the day, the warez/emulator group Damaged Cybernetics included its members to use a standard page background and images, at standard URLs. That way, users who browsed through their sites will have cached the images and need not load them again when viewing another member's site. In the days of dialup this was a big deal.
It's not good practice to rely on a user's cache. If they visit your site twice in a span of a day, they may have already cleared their cache or pushed your files out with other sites' files.
This article demonstrates a pretty good method to reduce unnecessary byte transfer which will ultimately speed up page loading.
Caching is still a good idea, because if a user decides to browse to another page on the same site in the same visit (or refresh/post a comment), a significant fraction of the data required for it has already been loaded. If a user does come back, there's always a chance that your stuff will still be in the cache.
Comments
Article presents incorrect information as truth.
Optimize for cache hits, then no requests happen!
Back in the day, the warez/emulator group Damaged Cybernetics included its members to use a standard page background and images, at standard URLs. That way, users who browsed through their sites will have cached the images and need not load them again when viewing another member's site. In the days of dialup this was a big deal.
If every server knew how to properly cache even static assets, more sites would handle a HN traffic surge.
That may work for a high-traffic site like Google, but what about sites that aren't in the Alexa top 10 (or even 1000)? ;)
if your user goes to your site twice, he has your assets in cache.
It's not good practice to rely on a user's cache. If they visit your site twice in a span of a day, they may have already cleared their cache or pushed your files out with other sites' files.
This article demonstrates a pretty good method to reduce unnecessary byte transfer which will ultimately speed up page loading.
Caching is still a good idea, because if a user decides to browse to another page on the same site in the same visit (or refresh/post a comment), a significant fraction of the data required for it has already been loaded. If a user does come back, there's always a chance that your stuff will still be in the cache.
If your site loads slowly he won't come back the second time.