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.
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Re: Don't blame dynamic pages
Date: 2008-03-22 11:00 pm (UTC)I think most schools on web design are taught by artists who are frankly mystified by the technology. One can't blame them for trying to earn a buck (it's this silly economics thing where we often need to prostitute ourselves or starve). It is sad though.
Many people don't realise they're supposed to care about filesize. They see a pretty page on their monitor that loads fast on their computer. At that point it seems to become the end of the subject. There are some web designers though, who should know better. At one point I gave feedback to GoDaddy.com about the difficulty of accessing some of their pages, pointing out that they had to be scrolled both horizontally and vertically on screens of 800x600 or less, and that a very large fraction of users were older people whose eyesight demands lower resolutions. I didn't mention that one of the beautiful things about html (bless Tim Berners-Lee) is that it automatically fits itself to the display device. So what was the response from GoDaddy? I was shrugged off with "The web standard is 1024x768." This was such an utterly stupid reply it floored me. Of all people they should know better. These days I recommend GoDaddy to people for 2 things:
- the lowest domain and server prices I've seen, and
- absolutely the worst webpage design I've ever come across. I get confused and lost every time I visit.
Re: Don't blame dynamic pages
Date: 2008-03-27 09:11 pm (UTC)I'm so sorry.
Hey, aren't you supposed to pity me or something for a while until you forget what a jerk I am?
Re: Don't blame dynamic pages
Date: 2008-03-28 10:46 am (UTC)Oh Bob. You nut. :)
I actually haven't the faintest idea of the episode you're referring to. Either I've forgotten it (in which case I didn't see you as being bad), or you are misremembering the thing you said and beating yourself up over nothing, or you said it to someone else (you bastard :P ).
Hey. On that topic, I've noticed a disturbing tendency in myself nowadays to remember incidents that I know are unimportant, but I beat myself up over and over and over again about them. Just the other day I caught myself getting all embarrassed about something that someone else did years ago! I mentally smacked myself upside the head for that one -- if it wasn't enough that I constantly ride myself about inconsequentials, now I do it on other people's behalf???
I know I never used to beat myself up this much (I was probably an arrogant, stuck-up shit), but ugh, I have certainly overcompensated now. Personally I prefer being the tormented, agonising soul -- not for the pain, I hate that part -- but for the fact that it makes me more tolerant and helpful. I hope it makes me wiser too, but not much sign of wisdom lately... still making plenty of imbecilic mistakes. [sigh]
Re: Don't blame dynamic pages
Date: 2008-03-29 12:38 am (UTC)I think the latter is more likely. If I'd been as stupid and patronizing to you as I remembered, you'd have killed me!
sure all the Puritans came to America?
Or maybe we're both partly Jewish, if that stereotype has any more validity than all the other stereotypes that bedevil us. Surely we're a guilt-ridden species. Somebody once said humans are the only species that feels guilt. He hadn't met my dogs.
Is there a dog in your life now? It might be the dog's fault.
About 3 weeks ago I swear I yelled at my Last Remaining Therapist Rose Marie, "Christ, I feel stupid, thank you!" But I felt like crap afterward and left our gym and caught her in the hall and apologized to her, but she told me at the time that she didn't remember it at all. A few days later she said, "So what did you apologize to me for?" I think I yelled.
So now do you see what might lie ahead for you?
Maybe we can even out our karma accounts, not by being nice to somebody we haven't actually been mean to, but by being mean to random people.
Just be bastards all the time.
Re: Don't blame dynamic pages
Date: 2008-03-29 12:41 am (UTC)I think the latter is more likely. If I'd been as stupid and patronizing to you as I remembered, you'd have killed me!
> caught myself getting all embarrassed about something that someone else did years ago!
Are you sure all the Puritans came to America?
Or maybe we're both partly Jewish, if that stereotype has any more validity than all the other stereotypes that bedevil us. Surely we're a guilt-ridden species. Somebody once said humans are the only species that feels guilt. He hadn't met my dogs.
Is there a dog in your life now? It might be the dog's fault.
About 3 weeks ago I swear I yelled at my Last Remaining Therapist Rose Marie, "Christ, I feel stupid, thank you!" But I felt like crap afterward and left our gym and caught her in the hall and apologized to her, but she told me at the time that she didn't remember it at all. A few days later she said, "So what did you apologize to me for?" I think I yelled.
So now do you see what might lie ahead for you?
Maybe we can even out our karma accounts, not by being nice to somebody we haven't actually been mean to, but by being mean to random people.
Let's ust be bastards all the time.