Design & Publishing . / . WEB . / . Pixelsmith . / . Beware the Single Pixel-Trick . / . Time is Everything

The single pixel gif?
(continued)

Time is everything...

This morning we tested the download time of several sites which contain lots of graphics in addition to the single-pixel spacing trick. The loading times (at 5 am EST, during low web traffic hours) with graphics turned off differed substantially from those where the browser had to build the graphics.
__ A 23K page with 44 graphics took six times (600%) longer to load with graphics turned on. We flushed the browser cache, and quit the browser before each new visit. Loading time with graphics was still considered acceptable -- 20 to 30 seconds at 28.8, however the real shock came with what the page actually looked like with the graphics turned off.
__ We are not writing this however because of size or additional download time requirements. It's because of the rapid and widespread increase in the number of people surfing the web with graphics turned off.
__ Moving to the page with heavy single-pixel use, the graphics-off page looked like a war zone. The layout was totally destroyed, displaying each short paragraph of type using a beginning gif, indent gif and ending gif. There were 16 of these on the page driving the number of broken graphic icons up to 48, just for the single-pixel spacers. The use of the trick was also causing some strange visuals because two of the gifs were separated by a <BR> or line break tag. So they were stacked. This also caused the page to become 2.2 times longer than the designer had intended.

Previous: How it works _ Next: What stands in the way.