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: I love it
Date: 2008-03-28 10:28 am (UTC)I have heard her music, but didn't know anything about her. Australia still has a fairly large cultural cringe, where we undervalue our own artists, scientists, thinkers, and so on. Most people think this a bad thing, but it is one of the things I value most about this country. It means we are ummm... (what is the opposite to xenophobic?)... citizens of Earth rather than citizens of Australia. Not all of us, of course. We certainly have our share of patriotic bigots -- especially since the previous nasty little prime minister embarked on a massive campaign of fostering flag-waving nationalism, like the nice little fascist he was. Thankfully we've been so convinced that we are less-than everyone else over the last couple of centuries, it has been hard to shake off. :)
Play Missy for Me
Date: 2008-03-29 12:04 am (UTC)Another fave, but totally different: Alison Krauss. The next time you hear the radio announcer mention her name, get ready for a total eargasm.
The Almusic Guide, which feels itself under a heavy obligation to be snarky, nevertheless says "When Alison Krauss sings, the angels stop what they were doing and take notes."