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Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003
Andy King writes "Within the last five years, the size of the average web page has more than tripled, and the number of external objects has nearly doubled. While broadband users have experienced somewhat faster response times, narrowband users have been left behind." The article breaks down a number of changes besides just page size, including image types and video duration.
Around 1/2 a megabyte. Yup. That big.
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... let's note how they've grown in screen size, too! I mean, back in the day, it used to be good enough to have a monitor that could display 640x480. Now, if you're using a 14" CRT, you're totally out of luck when viewing the intarwebs!
Ahem... honestly, I agree that "narrowband users have been left behind," but so have those with smaller monitors, older operating systems, and the like. Sometimes upgrading the hardware/software is just a necessity at some point. If you can't, chances are there's a library nearby that has some newer hardware that might work.
Would it be better if we went back to having a high content/low content index page so the user could pick which one they wanted? Maybe... but I don't think it's necessary, and it usually involves a lot more work.
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How many web pages had embedded video as a matter of course in 2003?
It seems to me that embedded video alone could account for at least half of this increase.
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It's not the size, it's what you do with it that counts.
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The U.S. is big, and there's a lot of it where the local phone connection is as good as it gets.
Low bandwidth, flexible pages using CSS are also good for people on mobile units w/ small screens.
William
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I wish more sites thought about narrowband users not because I myself am stuck with narrowband, but because I find that broadband-focused sites hide the pure content you want in a maze of gimmicks like Flash and needlessly dynamic HTML. Sure, in some areas (certain web applications), such features make the experience more efficient, but most of the time it is fluff.
Everything still runs pretty fast, certainly much faster than those few occasions when I need graphics or https: and run Firefox. The difference is noticable on all machines, and greatest (~2x) on the slower ones.
Sometimes formatting gets messed up, but the main content is still in text and still very readable.
"Those people in rural area's still have the ability to get high speed internet, such as satellite, direct line of site towers, cellular or even DSL."
People who don't have to deal with are very misinformed about what is available. There is no cellular or towers available. DSL isn't even remotely feasable. And sattelite is so over sold by the 2 monopolies that the speed is OFTEN less than the 24.4 tops dial up that is available from 2 carriers.
Yes, were I live sucks big time. I made the mistake of thinking coverage would eventually be available, but its not. Around here (southern VA, east TN) a $50 dollar bribe to a cop and you can still get away with murder. It's the old west. I dont see things changing any time soon.
But no, I don't expect anyone to do anything to help poor old me out. But just don't go around thinking I have options available, I don't.
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Whatever next? Software expands to fill the hardware available....?
It might be extra work, might even be a pita, but 'unfeasible'? Most modern websites of any size separate content from presentation through some sort of content management system.
With a decent CMS it should be trivial to offer a 'light' version of your site - I think someone else mentioned the low graphics version of the BBC news site as an example.
It is possible that a lot of the content that is increasing page sizes are flash adverts - if I fire up internet explorer there seems to be an ever increasing number of these animated adverts (can folk actually read a web page with three animated adverts amongst the text?). I'd hazard a guess that the reason many sites don't offer light versions of their pages is the threat to revenue through decreased ad views and has very little to do with the complexity of serving up two variants of a website.
NoScript is your friend. Avoid a lot of bloat (flash/javascript ads?), and adds some security
The opposite of broadband is baseband in computerspeak. I've lamented the misuse of narrowband in this context for years, and now even the geek sites are getting it wrong. Ever heard of 100 base T?
Ugh, I hate it when people describe dial-up as "narrowband" in an attempt to sound more technical. The term "broadband" is used to describe the signal encoding, not bandwidth. Therefore the converse of "broadband is "baseband," not narrowband. The opposite of narrowband is "wideband", and refers to something else. Um, k? Glad we have that all cleared up.
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Dynamic HTML generally doesn't take up much more bandwidth than normal HTML - a couple of extra bytes for a few CSS rules and a few lines of javascript. It makes pages feel slow and clunky because it makes the browser work harder, not because its straining your bandwidth.
Flash too, despite the bad rep it gets here can (I stress, can be fairly small in size.
The reason these things feel clunky isn't because they're big and slow, it's because they're, well, clunky.
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People think 'broadband' means 'fast'. Actually broadband can ~= faster. Broadband just means that there a particular signaling path has broader range of frequencies (more bandwidth) than some other signaling path. 768Kbps ADSL is broadband compared with a 56Kpbs modem, but is not broadband compared against a fiber optic connection.
In a more technical sense in telecommunications, though broadband is divided into into channels, where baseband just has one signal over the maximum of the bandwidth of the medium. So while cable is a broadband technology and 100-base-TX is a baseband technology, 100-base-TX is of course, much, much faster than cable.
The opposite of 'narrowband' is 'wideband', which doesn't mean the same thing as 'broadband' despite the fact the 'wide' and 'broad' are synonyms.
Confused yet?
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Advertising on the web has tripled over the last five years? It's most definitely what's clogging the pipes...er, tubes.
What?
Agreed with the lite option.
I'd even go a step further.
Accessibility options. A page done almost entirely in Flash is almost guaranteed to be inaccessible to someone with a screen reader.
Another pet peeve is cropping a page so that it has only one page of info on it. I can use the scroll bar on the site. Give me (at least the option) of reading the entire article on one freeking page. It can contain ads every 'x' lines of text, I don't want to keep clicking!!!! (Carpel tunnel here I come).
If anyone wants to see just how bad a web page can be, try http://www.afl.com.au/. Australia's most popular web site. The intern was obviously given a list of technologies to include, but bugger the content and usability.
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And if one uses an XSLT stylesheet, one needn't even include the header/sidebar/footer on each page- just let the XSLT wrap it around the content div.
Really, given how even IE6 supports it, XSLT is almost criminally underused...
I agree, the availability is really overestimated by people who are not in those situations. My parents live on a major highway less than a mile from the city limits of a city with a population of around 70K. There is no cable, no dsl, and they live at a lower elevation near the river so the local wireless provider doesn't have line of sight. Other than satellite, which as you say is pretty much a joke, they have no options. Cellular might be workable, but it's somewhat cost prohibitive as well. The problem isn't so much the size of the pages, but the overall availability of broadband. There needs to be a cost effective way to get high band out to these 'rural' areas.
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Is that with the advent of the WYSIWYG, every Charlie dipstick that can figure out how to use one thinks He's/She's a web developer. It doesn't surprise me that page size has doubled. The average WYSIWYG writes crappy code, and if you don't know how to write it yourself the page stays bloated.
It has however, benefited my pocket since many of the businesses who have had a site built by these morons come looking for someone to "make their sites work better." It does still amaze me that even in this day and age your average business still doesn't check the credentials or abilities of the people that they hire as programmers.
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