I'm not talking about download times, I'm talking about execution time. Size affects execution performance, whether it is cached or not.
This is because almost invariably the larger the JS is, the more code you're likely executing.
That's not necessarily true; jQuery does all kinds of performance tricks that are far too complicated to do in straight JS code.
Re:Mobile development with HTML5
by HardlySarcastic on Thursday August 25, 2011 @11:11PM
(#2927224)
This is exactly why I run my text editors in Windows 95 still. There is far less code than current versions of windows and I find a huge performance hit when using these newer versions.
I agree that client-side rendering is not optimal, but for different reasons. This isn't 2006 anymore, phones are more powerful now. Unless I absolutely have to, I'm not going to care about your Nokia from back in the Stone Age. My problem with client-side rendering is that it chokes on large data-sets. You also have to pay the penalty to download the dynamic content after you download the static content, but this can be mitigated by only updating the content, rather than using AJAX to load it all to begin with. That also kills the author's use of the plug-in that stores AJAX data locally, but that's a separate issue.
My advice: Use jQuery, jQuery Mobile, and AppCache. When combined, jQuery and jQuery Mobile (including CSS) take up 58KB of space. Oh, and since you're storing it all locally from now on, there's no need to cry about the time (less than 1s on 3g) it takes to download all those fancy JS files.