Not true. For example, a rails website out of the box doesn't cache content pages. Before sprockets the assets were not explicitly cached. There's quite a bit of work that you have to do to make an application highly cacheable. Using a static site generator like Middleman ensures that your app has no moving parts when its on a server, which makes caching very trivial.
"And why would you get bonus points for making it 700kb or less?"
Yes, you would. In our world we might have 10,000 people sitting in a room pulling our mobile app over a crappy wifi connection. Every byte counts and we need to be super aggressive about caching. I encourage you to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput....
"And setting arbitrary limits (1.44mb) is just silly."
It is silly, that's the point! Our app weighs in at roughly 2.5mb with Retina assets, which I had to cut to get it to fit on the floppy.
> In our world we might have 10,000 people sitting in a room pulling our mobile app over a crappy wifi connection.
Just to reinforce this point to folks who are skeptical, there's this great writeup called "Page Weight Matters" by Chris Zacharias where he talks about how smaller page size for a YouTube video literally lit up African, South American, and Southeast Asian smartphone traffic.
By minimizing page size through switching to html5, the page load times dropped to a sufficient level where people who previously did not have access to youtube could finally get access.
Key quotes:
> Further investigation revealed that, in these places, the average page load time under Feather was over TWO MINUTES! This meant that a regular video page, at over a megabyte, was taking more than TWENTY MINUTES to load!
> This was the penalty incurred before the video stream even had a chance to show the first frame. Correspondingly, entire populations of people simply could not use YouTube because it took too long to see anything.
Not true. For example, a rails website out of the box doesn't cache content pages. Before sprockets the assets were not explicitly cached. There's quite a bit of work that you have to do to make an application highly cacheable. Using a static site generator like Middleman ensures that your app has no moving parts when its on a server, which makes caching very trivial.
"And why would you get bonus points for making it 700kb or less?"
Yes, you would. In our world we might have 10,000 people sitting in a room pulling our mobile app over a crappy wifi connection. Every byte counts and we need to be super aggressive about caching. I encourage you to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Comput....
"And setting arbitrary limits (1.44mb) is just silly."
It is silly, that's the point! Our app weighs in at roughly 2.5mb with Retina assets, which I had to cut to get it to fit on the floppy.
Laugh a little bit, this is suppose to be fun!