November, 2007

CSS defines only three bullet shapes: disc, circle, and square. To get custom bullets, web designers use small bullet images. The network latency cost for these images is high, slowing down the web site. Instead, avoid bullet images and use Unicode symbol characters as bullets. Unicode bullets require nothing extra to download and provide thousands of bullet shapes to choose from.

A typical web page bar chart uses an image from a presentation or spreadsheet application. The network latency cost for the image is high, slowing down the web site. Instead, create bars using rows of Unicode block characters: █. The characters are much faster to download and they scale well as the font size is changed.