expecially for embed code

Thank you !

Thanks for these suggestions – believe it or not, we’ve already done the JS combining for the next release. They’re separate files at the moment, but they are compressed (with gzip – what makes you think they aren’t?).

Re CSS combining, this is always a trade-off of load time vs number of requests. For the moment we’ll stick with a few smaller files that are only loaded when needed (speeds up loading of the front page).

CSS sprites are cool, that’s why we’ve combined the 80 or so icons into one sprite in the last release. They have one major problem though, and that’s to do with PNG alpha transparency on IE6. But you’re right, the toolbar icons are a candidate (they’re gifs anyway).

Thanks for your tips – would love to give you a Premium upgrade but I guess then we’d suddenly get lots of blog comments … tell you what though, when you upgrade I’ll extend your membership by 6 months! Not as good as a straight upgrade I know, but all I can do…

Thanks again & stay tuned for faster loading,
Michael

Why does MM load 16 external JS files and 4 external CSS files when I open a map? On top of that, they seem to be uncompressed as well.

I suggest that you write a script that automatically:

1) Combines all JS files into one JS file
2) Combines all CSS files into one CSS file
3) Compresses both of the above (removing whitespace, comments, etc)
4) Cache this on the server
5) Just load the two cached files, one for JS and one CSS file

This would both reduce the number of HTTP requests made and reduce the amount of data transferred, thus making MM faster to load

Since all files are combined into new files and cached by a script, you could still edit the original files in their original formats with indents, linebreaks and comments

Maybe you also could look into combining the toolbar icons into one graphic (“css sprite”), saving about 20 extra http requests?

I just think these small efforts would really make an impact on your outstanding product, and I am ready to accept a premium membership as a reward for making my excellent suggestion

Best regards,
Torkil