The good news is that it worked out fine. I find myself giving a lot more thought to sustainable structure and the real-world usefulness of features we're considering building into sites. I'm not going to change my life, take the cybermonk's hood, and devote my days and nights to Perl scripts, but the experience did get me thinking. It also reminded me that what was once so may no longer be so, or at least may no longer be as important as it once was. I was near the end of a training session on constructing Web graphics, along with the people who are going to maintain this site.
Small graphics are the Holy Grail of the site builder.
I stopped dead in my own tracks and listened to my own words, silly and obsolete words, bouncing around the room. It was embarrassing. I don't access the Web at those speeds today, and you probably don't either. But I was still stuck in yesterday's assumption that you'd better make sure all your graphics files are tiny. The world has changed.