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File-size and bandwidth obsessions are not bad qualities to find in a webmaster: bandwidth costs you money, and the longer it takes for someone to download all the bits and pieces that make up your site, the more likely it is that your visitor will give up and leave – especially if your server is already busy serving hundreds of files to somebody else…!
One of the biggest expenses in bandwidth is AJAX libraries: although they’re developed to be relatively compact, and you can minify them easily, a full version of JQuery UI 1.6 will “cost” you and your visitors almost half a megabyte! And the worst thing is, every time that same person goes off to another site which also uses the exact same library as the one of your site, they still have to download it all over again.
Fortunately it’s a case of Google to the rescue on this one. A short while ago they unveiled their Google AJAX Libraries API where they have made a pledge to host a number of AJAX libraries (and different releases) permanently, and they actively encourage web developers to use them. That way you get Google’s distributed network serving your AJAX libraries (at the speed of light!) so you save server bandwidth (you can also select the minified version of your library for even quicker results) and hosting space. Even better is that if a visitor to your website has already visited another site that presented the same Google-hosted AJAX library to their browser, they have it in cache so it’s a quicker and less bandwidth-intensive experience for them too.
Unless you’re using custom builds of these AJAX libraries you have absolutely no excuse, the embed code doesn’t even look any different:
So get into your current websites tonight and make the switch, it’ll take you all of about ten seconds.
[...] this limitation by hosting different elements of your site under different domains, or allowing Google to host your AJAX libraries (which also has quite a few other advantages) – this means that the visitor’s browser [...]