A real-world experiment on elements of web 2.0

My recent post made an observation on the design elements of modern web. I was curious if I can actually create a design based on the observations made and the result is... (drum roll)... Phototinkr.com. A highly optimized online photo editor. Most of the design elements I recognized are applied to the UI design of the site.

The design principle of the application is based on Pareto principle, specifically, to analyze the photo editing tasks to find minimal set of editing options that suffice most of the editing requirements. For example, to place a text on the image, only three different sizes of text would satisfy most casual users.

Elements of web 2.0

From my observation, there seems to be a pattern in the modern web designs and here is a quick rundown of most common web 2.0 design elements:

• Be smooth: Use slight gradient filled color background
• High contrast: White is the color of choice for text-intensive area
• Well-rounded: Use of round corners is a must but don't over use it.
• Nice kuler: Color ideas can be found from one of the highest-rated color themes on kuler
• start small: De-capitalize the site name.
• Good prefix: Don't use i- or my- prefix. i- is already overused by Apple. The first introduction of my- to computing world I can recall is "My Computer" used in Microsoft Windows 95 (that's twelve years ago!) Luckily, e- was already outdated.
• Be information-savvy: put RSS, comments icons
• Consistent, consistent, consistent: Always be consistent in the design and user interaction. This seems to follow from the UI design best practices.

Program to obfuscate (and leave the rest to JavaScript interpreter?)

As many of you may know, different JavaScript coding constructs yield different compresssion ratio when compressed by a JavaScript obfuscator.

Are there any correlations between the compression ratio and other properties of the code? Specifically, will the constructs that yield the best compression ratio will also have the smallest size or the fastest running code?