Delivering the Graphic Goods
By Phil Stevens
A picture's said to be worth a thousand words. But can you get a 1KB graphic to say as much as a couple hundred words of text?
Delivery bottlenecks can be ulcer inducing for administrators and end users. The most generous contributors to those bottlenecks are the very things that make the Web the richest content space on the Internet: graphics and multimedia.
To make page loads snappier, look at several areas where speed might be improved: image file optimization, site layout, and server performance tuning.
Image optimization technologies
Various vendors
See below for URLs and pricing details. |
Image Compression from LuraTech and Elecard
If you need to shrink photographic images or documents at high ratios and can't accept the quantization artifacts (blockiness and loss of edge data) inherent in lossy JPEG compression, try wavelet technology. No top-level MIME types currently exist for browsers to render these images, so you must display them with plug-ins or helper applications. But because wavelet compression uses mathematical functions that introduce fewer errors in the quantization window, it can preserve more visual detail while creating dramatically smaller files. LuraTech provides a series of wavelet compression tools, and a stand-alone encoder and Java viewer are also available from Elecard.
I tried LuraTech's free SmartCompress stand-alone, the LuraWave Photoshop plug-in ($79), a free Linux version of XV with the LuraWave wavelet compression engine, and the free Java viewer and Netscape plug-in.
