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

[rene]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:33:56 +1100, Craig Sanders wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 01:54:23PM +1000, rene wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>
> try the same site in Firefox with the NoScript and Adblock plugins
> installed and turned on.

I do similar with Opera, and also block some of the worst/most common 
advertising/etc domains at my computer firewall.

> the site will work perfectly well, and much faster without all the
> advertising and spyware.

Relatively recently - on some sites - pages do not work perfectly well with 
Javascript turned off. Some of them do things like use javascript to load 
bits of css, or some other formatting thing, so with it turned off one can 
get a mess - e.g. css formatted text blocks overlapping each other. Opera 
can also turn off the website developer's css - on a per page basis, so 
sometimes I've turned that off, to get what looks like plain old easy to 
read HTML 4.0.

Irene