YSlow: Reduce the number of DOM elements

A complex page means more bytes to download, and it also means slower DOM access in JavaScript.

Reduce the number of DOM elements on the page to improve performance.

recommends:

A high number of DOM elements can be a symptom that there's something that should be improved with the markup of the page without necessarily removing content.

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

  • Are you using nested tables for layout purposes?
  • Are you throwing in more <div>s only to fix layout issues?
  • Is there a better and more semantically correct way to do your markup?

A great help with layouts are the YUI CSS utilities: grids.css can help you with the overall layout, fonts.css and reset.css can help you strip away the browser's defaults formatting. This is a chance to start fresh and think about your markup, for example use <div>s only when it makes sense semantically, and not because it renders a new line.

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