So minimal... So inefficient...<p>There's a reason we do image, css and javascript includes in HTML. This idea undoes all that.<p>I can't imagine why the author, clearly a bright guy, went out of his way to build this thing.
My build scripts are such an "evolved" mish-mash of Python3, Python2, Java, makefiles, and shell scripts that I'm amazed they work for <i>me</i>, much less for anyone else. (This point was brought home to me when I moved to a new laptop and spent too long trying to remember and install all the dependencies.)<p>Anyway, nice job, and hooray for unintended uses of open source code.
I like it, it's clever, but I was disappointed that the headline was misleading in the interest of being catchy. "How I made my website a one-hit-wonder (intentionally)" might have done the same thing without me thinking "oh, he just stripped out newlines".
Added a note about nginx http_gzip_static_module which doesn't get used as much as it should.<p>One tip on the gzip parameters, I use -9cn. The 'n' flag is important as your gzipped files will not appear corrupted by many gzip online checking tools. E.g. everything is green: <a href="http://redbot.org/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsimeramov.com%2F2010-07-ocd" rel="nofollow">http://redbot.org/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsimeramov.com%2F2010-07-...</a>. Took me a while to figure it out. I believe it also benefits rsync.<p>There is one serious downside to all this reckless optimization -- I don't even notice the bandwidth RRD graphs changing if some page hit the HN front page or get featured elsewhere. The pages are so small the graphs almost always look the same, i.e. basically flat :) All the bandwidth is from me backing up my home dir to server.
50% of my load time was trying to pull the favicon and getting the 404. I wonder if there is a way to use the <LINK rel=icon ...> tag to tell a browser <i>not</i> to look for a favicon. It is eluding my googlabilty if there is.
Looking at the source, there's no html, head or body tag in the document (but there are CSS styles referencing the body tag, hmm).<p>This could be some minimization trickery that assumes most browsers can deal with malformed html documents, but [slams fists on table] IT'S NOT RIGHT, I TELL YOU!
Thought: do data urls work in .css files? e.g. background: url(data:....); ? Because then you could have one cacheable file (everything.css) that sits along side your pages (use background images instead of plain old imgs), so you would only have to download them once, not on every page load.
Includes are valuable for re-usability. If a website has a relatively low number of page hits/user or doesn't implement a standard across many pages, the benefits of includes are reduced.<p>This concept could be progressed into a proxy server!