the net is largely dialup unfriendly now
Dec. 2nd, 2012 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eSince the lightning storm destroyed my satellite connection I'm using dialup connection again. It has really brought home to me how sloppy webpage makers have made much of the net a broadband-users-only club. Unfortunately most people in the world use either dialup or slow mobile wireless charged per byte. It is amazing how much time I now waste looking at a blank page waiting for its contents to load. This really is inexcusable. It is easy to make pages that load in an instant, and ones that load progressively so that the user isn't stuck looking at nothing until the whole shebang is loaded.
Laziness and a preoccupation with superficial fashion are largely to blame for this pitiful state. Laziness, because most people use automated tools to create webpages instead of taking the time to learn about efficiency and simple HTML and CSS, but that is really the lesser of the two evils. Fashion is much worse. It leads people to make pages that are different for no reason other than to be different. If this didn't impact usability then it would be relatively unimportant, but everything gets sacrificed on the altar of the great god of superficial appearance now. Fins are fashionable? Bolt on lots of fins. Blinking lights? Sprinkle liberally. Buckles? Strap on lots of big ones. Blue and black? Yeah, lets make that stuff almost unreadable. Scrolling vertically is old; let's spend ages downloading code to make it scroll sideways... because we can.
Some argue that look is important, and to some degree I would concur... but when a webpage is supposed to convey information then you have the choice of using appearance to enhance or degrade it. As for things that look "cool" or "fashionable", it is a mirage. There are few things as ugly as old fashion, and all fashionable things very quickly become old-fashioned, whereas usability is timeless.
I don't understand why fashion victims always think that their favorite "edgy" look will last for ever. It only takes minimal awareness to notice how even the very recent past is littered with dead fashions.
We are wrecking the web.
Laziness and a preoccupation with superficial fashion are largely to blame for this pitiful state. Laziness, because most people use automated tools to create webpages instead of taking the time to learn about efficiency and simple HTML and CSS, but that is really the lesser of the two evils. Fashion is much worse. It leads people to make pages that are different for no reason other than to be different. If this didn't impact usability then it would be relatively unimportant, but everything gets sacrificed on the altar of the great god of superficial appearance now. Fins are fashionable? Bolt on lots of fins. Blinking lights? Sprinkle liberally. Buckles? Strap on lots of big ones. Blue and black? Yeah, lets make that stuff almost unreadable. Scrolling vertically is old; let's spend ages downloading code to make it scroll sideways... because we can.
Some argue that look is important, and to some degree I would concur... but when a webpage is supposed to convey information then you have the choice of using appearance to enhance or degrade it. As for things that look "cool" or "fashionable", it is a mirage. There are few things as ugly as old fashion, and all fashionable things very quickly become old-fashioned, whereas usability is timeless.
I don't understand why fashion victims always think that their favorite "edgy" look will last for ever. It only takes minimal awareness to notice how even the very recent past is littered with dead fashions.
We are wrecking the web.