One claimed advantage is to reduce CSS & JS requests and I know Google favours sites which do this, but why?
If a browser already has a socket open to a site and the server is using a thread model for requests, there should be little extra overhead in using small CSS and JS snippet requests.
For a site with a large number of pages, it seems a distinctly bad idea to concatenate the CSS and JS – as it results in excessive duplication in the cache and overall slower load times; much better to keep things separate and the browser can then cache them quickly…
Alasdair
Sorry – bit late in the day…
One claimed advantage is to reduce CSS & JS requests and I know Google favours sites which do this, but why?
If a browser already has a socket open to a site and the server is using a thread model for requests, there should be little extra overhead in using small CSS and JS snippet requests.
For a site with a large number of pages, it seems a distinctly bad idea to concatenate the CSS and JS – as it results in excessive duplication in the cache and overall slower load times; much better to keep things separate and the browser can then cache them quickly…