[thelist] Whatever Happened to Fast Loading Pages?

[Ben Henick]

--- "Villano, Paul" <VillanoP at usachcs-emh1.army.mil> wrote:
> This is something of a rant, so forgive me.  Grin.  My web connection
> is
> having some sort of seizure today, so slow-loading pages from hell
> are
> taking even longer...much, much longer to load.  I've searched in
> vain on
> every one for a TEXT ONLY page...to no avail.

Funny you should bring this up, as I caught wind of a govt. RFP and am
thinking of responding (though it'd be long shot).  The requirements
led me to the w3c wai, which led me to the old days (as if I wasn't
already there, having browsed jwz.org that morning).

If I had to give a cause, it'd be this:  with the arrival of
(relatively) cheap high-speed connections (even here in Portland) a
designer can build a site with a homepage load of 120KB knowing full
well that the target audience most likely to spend their money (or
time) will be able to load it in 8-10 seconds most days.

Besides which, it's hard to mount anything worth having - in terms of
visual effect - without spending 30KB just to get in the door.  I'm
doing some funky rollovers for my new personal site (no slices) and
will somehow manage to keep the load at 40KB despite the fact that all
of the text is bitmapped.  Call me picky, but when I make a type
choice, THAT'S WHAT I WANT.

Also, Optimization is something that I suspect people don't do often
enough.  You'd be surprised how many production artists there are, with
a mostly-print background, who've been in and out of Web stuff for
years but still can't tell eight bits from a dollar.



=====
Ben Henick              |  "In the long run, men hit only
Web Author At-Large     |  what they aim at.  Therefore,
www.io.com/persist1/    |  though they should fail
persist1 at io.com         |  immediately, they had better aim
persist1_pdx at yahoo.com  |  high."  --Henry David Thoreau

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