How would you go about writing a script to switch the style sheet if low bandwidth is detected? Is this even possible?
The only way to detect bandwidth is to time the transfer of a file.
What you could do is to show a link to the low-bandwidth version while the large bandwidth version is loading,.
The low-bandwidth version could then store that preference in a cookie, so that other pages can then find out.
This will have to be javascript assisted by php. You can get php to print a timestamp when the page is requested. Javascript can detect when the page rendering is complete. The difference between the times should give you a rough idea of the bandwidth. A single image should be enough to detect this because javascript can detect when the image loading is complete.
Thanks this is very helpful. Google analytics shows bandwidth of users so I knew there must be a way.