Minimizing latency and connection count is only half of the problem, though. To the greatest extent possible not relying on JavaScript, and to the greatest extent possible not relying on third party libraries when you do seems like a good general takeaway.
Depends on which ones. Embedding assets as base64 makes little sense nowadays with http pipelining.
Relyinging the least possible on js, and using CSS for animations sounds like good engineering to me
Not really. The latency between a client and clearnet sites is tiny, and splitting assets in to separate resources makes caching work better.
Minimizing latency and connection count is only half of the problem, though. To the greatest extent possible not relying on JavaScript, and to the greatest extent possible not relying on third party libraries when you do seems like a good general takeaway.
Some people live in Australia though
With CDNs of today, they are not so much relevant for the clearnet.
Yes, but