I have been working a little more recently with PageSpeed
http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html
It seems that more and more this is becoming part of the design process that extends beyond just validating your html with tasks such as Minifying, enabling compression, minimizing DNS requests, and even parallelized download of images. Have any of you started to include such tasks in your development?

first we have to go with markup whether everything is perfect i mean testing in all browsers, w3c validated etc... then we have to go for page speed it depends on the code we write and images. Anyhow at the time of cropping we will crop the images as per our need no extra cropping. So, now we have to rewrite the code we written it may be html or css to load within seconds... reduce inline styles, maintain combing styles etc...