[lincolnbryant]

Right, and thanks for separating how to approach this issue in creation of an app vs maintenance. Real world issues like having a million images that are not compressed or sized correctly, or having part of an application out of your control that cannot be modernized or share assets with another part get in the way. There are companies that strive to outsource this work to a platform / appliance, like the recently acquired http://www.akamai.com/blaze instead of actually fixing/upgrading these issues (not to say that it works). After all, most companies don't have resources for their front-end devs to be profiling page loads by country and pushing HTTP performance under such dramatically different bandwidth/latency variations.