text, the net, and bandwidth fluff
Mar. 18th, 2008 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI've been reading a lot lately... well, I always read a lot, but lately I've been reading even more than normal. I have thousands of paper-based books, but have come to dislike reading paper. I much prefer ebooks. Specifically, I like reading them on my little Palm computer.
I'd finished reading an ebook of Keith Laumer stories I'd downloaded from the Baen Free Library http://www.baen.com/library/ some time ago. It was a lot of fun. I enjoy Keith Laumer's sense of humor. I felt I needed something else to read, but didn't want to read paper, so I tried a number of short pieces I'd downloaded from various places, but nothing felt satisfying. It had been a while since I'd visited Baen Books online, so I went to see what's new in their free collection. I have no money at the moment so couldn't afford to buy anything. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they've added quite a lot more titles to their free library. After browsing the library for a while to see what might suit me, and downloading a few books, I realised an odd thing. Each web page was taking an incredible amount of time to load. In fact they took almost as long to load as the books took to download. This is crazy, I thought. How can that be? Each page is just a few small images and a paragraph or two of text. So I looked at their source code. Each page is about 95% fluff -- unnecessary code -- and each page carries about 100K of mostly useless images. I'm not sure, but they same images seemed to have to be downloaded repeatedly instead of re-using cached images, which is odd.
I'm saddened by this, but it is not entirely unexpected. I come across more and more pages like this nowadays. People have even come to expect it. A few times recently people have been interested when I've mentioned that I make web pages, and have suggested that I might be interested in doing their pages for them. It has gotten to the point now where I feel a bit defeated by this after I ask a few questions to see what they want. Almost invariably they want a glossy magazine page on the net. But the net is very different to paper. They operate according to very different rules. When you turn over a page in a magazine it is just there whether it is a high-resolution photograph or plain text. On the net these things come with a cost. Text loads quickly (so long as it doesn't have great dollops of hidden code accompanying it). Pictures come more slowly, and much more slowly if they are large. Flash images not only take a long time to download, they can bring a computer to its knees by placing heavy computational demands upon it as well.
Lately many computer professionals have been showing a great love for dynamically generated pages. There is a very good place for dynamically generated pages, but they certainly aren't a cure-all. In fact if used for everything then they can generate vast swathes of garbage, which is left in pages, it seems, because it is easier than leaving it out. It has become one of those fads that seem to grip the computing community from time to time, and is making the net as slow as cold molasses.
Some time back I'd downloaded a story from another site, and last night reformatted it so I could read it on my Palm. About a third of it was unnecessary code! Worse, it was stuff that made it difficult to read on low resolution screens or to adapt to different fonts. And it was all stuck inside a table, which is one of my pet hates. I'm continually astounded at how many computer professionals don't realise that text inside a table doesn't display until it has all downloaded. This means a person on dialup trying to load a page filled with heaps of crap sits for ages watching a blank screen. That's just plain stupid. Most of the time the decision to use tables has no particular logic behind it. It is more, "We need to move the text across a little bit so we can fit a pretty image here so the logo can peek out the side near the top". It is the glossy magazine thing again.
I, like most people online, am on dialup. It feels like increasing numbers of web pages are getting slower to load as more web page creators snottily expect that everybody has top-of-the-range computers on broadband connections. I've mentioned to a number of such web designers how illogical it is that they design for a minority of their viewers, but many seem to feel such considerations are beneath them. It is not that they want to exclude people, it seems more that they simply don't understand the problem: "I have a fast machine on broadband it isn't my problem if others don't." That's depressing.
I wonder now how much of the internet traffic is just the electronic equivalent of smog.
I'd finished reading an ebook of Keith Laumer stories I'd downloaded from the Baen Free Library http://www.baen.com/library/ some time ago. It was a lot of fun. I enjoy Keith Laumer's sense of humor. I felt I needed something else to read, but didn't want to read paper, so I tried a number of short pieces I'd downloaded from various places, but nothing felt satisfying. It had been a while since I'd visited Baen Books online, so I went to see what's new in their free collection. I have no money at the moment so couldn't afford to buy anything. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they've added quite a lot more titles to their free library. After browsing the library for a while to see what might suit me, and downloading a few books, I realised an odd thing. Each web page was taking an incredible amount of time to load. In fact they took almost as long to load as the books took to download. This is crazy, I thought. How can that be? Each page is just a few small images and a paragraph or two of text. So I looked at their source code. Each page is about 95% fluff -- unnecessary code -- and each page carries about 100K of mostly useless images. I'm not sure, but they same images seemed to have to be downloaded repeatedly instead of re-using cached images, which is odd.
I'm saddened by this, but it is not entirely unexpected. I come across more and more pages like this nowadays. People have even come to expect it. A few times recently people have been interested when I've mentioned that I make web pages, and have suggested that I might be interested in doing their pages for them. It has gotten to the point now where I feel a bit defeated by this after I ask a few questions to see what they want. Almost invariably they want a glossy magazine page on the net. But the net is very different to paper. They operate according to very different rules. When you turn over a page in a magazine it is just there whether it is a high-resolution photograph or plain text. On the net these things come with a cost. Text loads quickly (so long as it doesn't have great dollops of hidden code accompanying it). Pictures come more slowly, and much more slowly if they are large. Flash images not only take a long time to download, they can bring a computer to its knees by placing heavy computational demands upon it as well.
Lately many computer professionals have been showing a great love for dynamically generated pages. There is a very good place for dynamically generated pages, but they certainly aren't a cure-all. In fact if used for everything then they can generate vast swathes of garbage, which is left in pages, it seems, because it is easier than leaving it out. It has become one of those fads that seem to grip the computing community from time to time, and is making the net as slow as cold molasses.
Some time back I'd downloaded a story from another site, and last night reformatted it so I could read it on my Palm. About a third of it was unnecessary code! Worse, it was stuff that made it difficult to read on low resolution screens or to adapt to different fonts. And it was all stuck inside a table, which is one of my pet hates. I'm continually astounded at how many computer professionals don't realise that text inside a table doesn't display until it has all downloaded. This means a person on dialup trying to load a page filled with heaps of crap sits for ages watching a blank screen. That's just plain stupid. Most of the time the decision to use tables has no particular logic behind it. It is more, "We need to move the text across a little bit so we can fit a pretty image here so the logo can peek out the side near the top". It is the glossy magazine thing again.
I, like most people online, am on dialup. It feels like increasing numbers of web pages are getting slower to load as more web page creators snottily expect that everybody has top-of-the-range computers on broadband connections. I've mentioned to a number of such web designers how illogical it is that they design for a minority of their viewers, but many seem to feel such considerations are beneath them. It is not that they want to exclude people, it seems more that they simply don't understand the problem: "I have a fast machine on broadband it isn't my problem if others don't." That's depressing.
I wonder now how much of the internet traffic is just the electronic equivalent of smog.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re: I love it
Date: 2008-03-19 09:00 pm (UTC)What would life on the intartubes be without a little blogpimping?
http://blog.crispen.org/archives/2008/03/16/intersectionality/
Off to hunt down "Insurance"
Re: I love it
Date: 2008-03-20 12:03 am (UTC)Intersectionality: doh! I should have checked your blog. I commented there now. Thanks Bob. Interesting.
Re: I love it
Date: 2008-03-20 02:03 am (UTC)OK, so it's going to be harder than I thought. Hey, if the door's closed, I'll go in the window. And if you want to come -- or if you want me to go along with you and lend a hand while you smash the state -- it's gonna be fun. Either way, or if we just slip notes of encouragement under each other's doors now and then .
Welcome back. I sure did miss you.
Intersect
Date: 2008-03-21 03:04 am (UTC)However, I did take your name in vain in one of my replies, so I figured Id better tell you so you can tell me to stuff a sock in it if that's appropriate.
Here 'tis:
It's all about allies.
We've got this beauriful country, from sea to shining sea. It's called "America."
Not Miriam, she's got another beautiful country called "Australia" where dragons live and even visit one of her trees! They're adorable.
You're welcome to join us. Even libertarians and conservatives are welcome in America (maybe in Australia, too), just so they keep their feet off the furniture and their dogmas in their own yardmas. I know some really lovely conservatives, and perhaps Miriam does too. I don't think my conservative friends really wanted to leave America, but perhaps the best thing to tell them is "Welcome back, we missed you.
When some of my conservative friends find out what the hatemongers have been doing to people in their names , there's going to be some right-wing noisemakers who won't have enough skin left on their butts to cover a small change purse.
Cheers. I did find "Insurance" on your LJ from way back when, but since neither my brain nor my cheap and nasty laptop are working properly, I'll be back to you when I've finally navigated through it. So far it's well worth the (very minimal) effort. That's a good story.
Rev. Bob, "the annoying one"