I do agree 100% that you can’t regularly deploy your App by doing copy and paste. Nobody who is working professionally on this will use copy and paste. I understood Steve referring to a small “standard” web site that someone wants to improve.

In the end the question is rather whether the rules Steve puts out are meant to be for an average site owner. On that side I think we rather have problems with improperly compressed (or not even compressed) images.

All in all I agree that Steves does a not-so-good job at explaining to whom this book and his practises actually matter. Bringing down a page of 200 HTTP requests to 100 makes sense. If you only have 20 requests, then leave the page alone. If you run Yahoo, you might want to bring it down to 2 requests.

It is the long standing battle between maintainability and optimization. If you run a huge web site that addresses a huge audience, it might make sense to delve into the topic of how to speed the page up to an unreasonable degree :)

The root of the problem is not particularly on Steve’s side. It’s rather the general perception of optimization. There are people who want to optimize the heck out of everything. And those tend to be very vocal. Still, I think a book like Steve’s is a better way of satisfying such people than web sites giving wrong suggestions.

Steve’s book and YSlow are to be used by a small audience. And by those who want to tune everything.