[LINK] How Websites load

[Richard Chirgwin]

Linkers,

Someone who knows technical details better than I do can probably 
enlighten me here...

The more that Websites add cruft that's useless to me, but useful to 
them, the slower they load. For eg: Crikey is a particular offender. It 
has a bunch of "social" plugins so you can like a story on Facebook, 
Tweet it, and so on. It also has trackers pointing back to Google, 
Doubleclick, fbcdn.com (ie, Facebook's content distribution network, I 
presume), Effectivemeasure.com IMR Worldwide and others. Some of these 
insist on connections to multiple servers (many Googles and many 
Facebooks, for eg).

But the cruft isn't exclusive to Crikey. It's just the one I picked on 
for an example, reading off the bottom of the browser to see who's being 
contacted.

While all this non-content stuff is loading, you can't even scroll a 
page. It's just hung, stalled, static as a rock.

Which brings me to the question: is there any good reason for the 
page-stall? Could a good Web designer say "ok, show them content, let 
them navigate while we backfill all our measurement trackers"? If just 
one of the servers is slow to respond, it may well be thirty seconds 
before you can actually USE the damn pages that insist on all this drivel.

Cheers,
Richard