Yahoo has developed the de facto standard for building fast front-ends for websites. The bad news: you have to follow 34 rules to get there. The good news: I'll take a subset of those rules, explain them, and show how you can implement those rules in an automated fashion to minimize impact on developers and designers for your high-traffic website.
17. Rules 9,20,24: Domains "Avoiding DNS lookups cuts response times, but reducing parallel downloads may increase response times. [A] guideline is to split these components across at least two but no more than four hostnames ."
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19. Rules 10,29: Minify Javascript /* Prototype JavaScript framework, version 1.5.1.1 * (c) 2005-2007 Sam Stephenson * * Prototype is freely distributable under the terms of an MIT-style license. * For details, see the Prototype web site: http://www.prototypejs.org/ * /*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/ var Prototype = { Version: '1.5.1.1', Browser: { IE: !!(window.attachEvent && !window.opera), Opera: !!window.opera, WebKit: navigator.userAgent.indexOf('AppleWebKit/') > -1, Gecko: navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Gecko') > -1 && navigator.userAgent.indexOf('KHTML') == -1 },... var Prototype={Version:"1.5.1.1",Browser:{IE:!!(window.attachEvent&&!window.opera),Opera:!!window.opera, WebKit:navigator.userAgent.indexOf("AppleWebKit/")>-1,Gecko:navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Gecko")>-1&& navigator.userAgent.indexOf("KHTML")==-1},BrowserFeatures:{XPath:!!document.evaluate,ElementExtensions:!! window.HTMLElement,SpecificElementExtensions:(document.createElement("div").__proto__!==document.createElement("form").__proto__)}...