[LINK] Worrying about the Dark Ages (was Re: ANAO report: Government Agencies' Management of their Websites)

[rene]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 09:32:52 +1100, Stilgherrian wrote:

> On 19/12/2008, at 2:08 PM, Craig Sanders wrote:
>> it's still worth worrying about.
>>
> And it's precisely that kind of response I was after. :) I don't know
> whether I agree with all of it in all circumstances, but it sums up the
> points that should be made back to the developers of web-bloat.

I think the 'bloat' issue applies, not only to those who provide only large 
PDF, but also to those who provide "html" but it's so bloated one way or 
another than it can take longer to download than an e.g. 1.7 Mb PDF.

Something I've increasingly noticed relatively recently is the 'size' of 
web pages containing a news article on e.g. major AU news sites (where the 
news article probably amounts to about 40Kb but the whole page amounts to 
like 500Kb or more). Such pages contains copious amounts of javascript, 
css, etc, and sundry other things, and also try to contact (and wait for 
connections to) numerous external domains for the purpose of pulling in 
advertisements and numerous other bits of "content" and the delay while 
waiting for such things to happen is sometimes very noticeable. One thing 
about a 1.7 Mb PDF is that once the connection is made, and assuming the 
server can cope with the number of connections, one stream of data from one 
site is downloaded pretty quickly. The same cannot be said, in my 
experience, for 'html' pages on some sites.

(Above is *not* advocacy for PDF format, it's a criticism of some "web" 
pages).

Irene