We've all recently fallen prey to the weblogs.asp.net changes to increase throughput on the server.

re: We've all recently fallen prey to the weblogs.asp.net changes to increase throughput on the server.

Justin Rogers — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 18:52:00 GMT

That was odd, had to unmoderate that comment for some reason...

In response, there has been a huge amount of work already done to compress the page sizes down. Most explicitly in terms of real compression which results in a much smaller page size. If all of THAT work has already been done, but you are worried about compressing a 2k CSS file as well (they enabled compression for the CSS file as noted by ScottW) then I think removing 100 bytes of viewstate and 2k worth of id's would be a great improvement (especially since the main page isn't cached on the user's machine for nearly as long as the CSS file is).

1. Removing ID's is a 3 line code change.
2. Getting rid of viewstate is a 1 liner
3. Smaller class names is a couple of minute grep/replace.
4. Stripping tabs is a 5 line code change.
5. Compactifying links is another very cheap change as well.

Half a days work (maybe, probably less) and you've just cut your page sizes by another 10%? I think the existing changes that were made took far longer than this and some of them resulted in the same or smaller pay-offs. The only super win space change you get is your compression. All the rest are trade-offs (compression is a computational trade-off, but gzip is one of the fastest compression algorithms).

RE: We've all recently fallen prey to the weblogs.asp.net changes to increase throughput on the server.

Scott Mitchell — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 18:39:00 GMT

Some of those IDs are needed because they are referenced in the CSS. But many of them (those of the 'HyperlinkX' flavor) can be scratched. The other suggestions are great, but I wonder at what point taking the time to make these small improvements outweighs the actual cost of just having them there... (i.e., the view state is, what, 100 bytes?)

re: We've all recently fallen prey to the weblogs.asp.net changes to increase throughput on the server.

Justin Rogers — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 18:25:00 GMT

Yep, customize your HtmlTextWriter to ignore that specific attribute. You'll see that in HtmlControl.RenderAttributes there is an explicit WriteAttribute for ("id", ClientID) giving you an idea of what you'll have to look for in WriteAttribute.

To be more selective you can override RenderAttributes on specific control types. HtmlAnchor is giving .Text a problem, so they could selectively create a better version that removes the id field.

re: We've all recently fallen prey to the weblogs.asp.net changes to increase throughput on the server.

James — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 07:36:00 GMT

Is there an easy way to have webcontrols without IDs? When nested deep inside a number of other controls they can get very long.