I think image minification and fonts gulp tasks should be gone

[ben]

1 - The initial npm install will take longer, yes, but then you have one of the most important optimizations:

@austin

I am very torn about removing them because out of all the things we do to increase performance (concat, uglify, minify, etc.) lossless image compression provides the bulk of the performance benefit. You can spend all day reducing javascript dependencies and thinning out your CSS: but reducing just one large jpg by 20% will pretty much have the same impact.

2 - This is a NPM issue and they’re working on it

3 - No. Gulp can do whatever you want it to do. It is a task runner. Photoshop is also definitely not the best tool for this job.

4 - This is a bit weird, yes. I’ve been copying the optimized images from dist/ back to src/.

5 - No one should ever be referencing assets that aren’t from the dist/ folder… your CSS loaded on the site is from dist/. All you need to do in your CSS is use '../images/example.jpg'

6 - Your example of using Google Fonts is only one use case. It’s a lot better to be serving fonts directly if you can to avoid external requests.

I’m not sure why you think gulp is only supposed to be used for CSS and JS.