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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.
It's not the size, it's what you do with it that counts.
Task Mangler
Internet access gets faster -> Web sites get bigger ...
Hard drives get bigger -> Applications use more space
Media storage increases -> Home videos get larger and quality improves
CPUs get faster -> Windows programmers add "features" and chow down on cycles
Fish bowls get larger -> Goldfish grow
Some good, some bad, some ugly. But not shocking.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
IIRC, that's actually smaller than it was before the 2.0 makeover. Before that you have to look back a long way to find a thinner and lighter Slashdot. Probably back before the sidebar was added. Slashdot has always been a fairly heavy website unless you use the lite mode, but at least it has a lot of content so that's not such a bad thing.
The biggest thing I'd argue is that advertisements have gotten heavier over the years, with static images giving way to animated images giving way to flash objects.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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?
Of course not. People shouldn't be specifiying the width for their columns in absolute terms in the first place. Use relative measures and let the browser decide where everything goes. At least that way your site degrades gracefully if the browser doesn't meet your expectations.
Well written HTML + CSS should be completely device independent. It should be fully navigable on a 1600x1400 monitor, a 320x240 cell phone, or a line by line screen reader. And it should be completely transparent to the user. We have the technology, designers just need to use it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
if by "quality improves" you mean resolution, I'll give you that one. But a quick glance of some of what litters youtube goes to show that 'quality' isn't going anywhere...