I'm working on a web application that has a lot to download (javascript, images, videos, etc), and I was wondering how many people still consider dial up while developing large web applications?
Is there a rule of thumb that you use to determine the individual page sizes? (i.e. home page must be less than 200k)
Depends on your user base. If you determine that a large portion of the people you wish to use your product have dial up, or you wish for everybody to use it, then you have to take it into account.
However, if you only want to hit a very niche audience who you know are broadband enabled, you can take a few more liberties.
No. But I try to limit the amount of material to only what is necessary. Typically use PNGs for images and keep the images to only what is necessary. I also use (for production) minified JS, compression, etc. Most of my apps are intranet apps and are accessed using the company network, though, so YMMV.
You might want to think about using the YSlow extension for Firefox to help minimize your page load time.
In general, you should strive for the fastest possible loading times. If this means minifying your code or making other such improvements then that's okay. In general I try to use file formats that are more compressed for faster loading times.
Do I explicitly think about dial-up users? No, not really.
Remember that today's dial-up is now the phone/mobile market! Making your pages faster to load is better for every user.
Depends on the website, Content Sites, Yea, I still think of website payload. ( maybe not modem speeds, but definitely payload management for Landing Pages / Homepages )
Business to Business, not really, as I am assuming most business looking at my sites are on at least DSL.
You need to see what you 90-95% user base and do your requirements around that, but speed should always be kept in mind.
(Yahoo's ySlow has been a great asset );
Anybody with dialup internet clearly doesn't give a sh*t about internet access (my grandparents come to mind), and therefore probably won't be interested in your website anyway. The people that I know that still have dialup use the internet for e-mail and maybe news only.
Especially if your website contains videos as an important part of the content, dialup users will just never be able to enjoy them no matter how you try to optimize.