[thelist] Whatever Happened to Fast Loading Pages?

[Ben Henick]

--- martin burns <martin at members.evolt.org> wrote:
> > Besides which, it's hard to mount anything worth having - in terms
> of
> > visual effect - without spending 30KB just to get in the door. 
> 
> Have you seen http://www.sylloge.com:8080/5k/winners_overall.html ?
> All under 5k, and there are some *very* nifty games in there.

Ouch.  I'd been wanting find out who the winners were... and yeah, I
feel really small now.  Some of the examples I thought were lame (I
coulda done that, too), but there are a few in there that blew my mind.
 Well, what's a day without learning?

> > of the text is bitmapped.  Call me picky, but when I make a type
> > choice, THAT'S WHAT I WANT.
> 
> I'm sorry, Ben, but you seem to be confusing the web for print.

Yes and no... Am I going to bitmap all of my content?  Of course not. 
Then it'd hardly be the Web.

Now, for a splash page... and considering that anti-aliasing makes
lettering more attractive anyway... different set of rules.

> > Also, Optimization is something that I suspect people don't do
> often
> > enough. 
> Agreed on that one.
> 
> 
> I don't see *why* you need to have one page suiting everyone. Why not
> do some clever server side sniffing and dynamically deliver your
> content in a suitable output template for the user agent (or the
> user's prefences)?

Which is great if in fact you have a good grasp of server-side
scripting... which I don't yet.

Yes, I know.  Believe me, I know.

> That way, you can do a version which is disabled accessible, you can
> do one which works on WAP, one which works on NN4's broken DOM and
> one which is standards compliant (and therefore works on IE5/Mac).

While in the meantime all of these pages will need some kind of
maintenance.  Maybe not as much as if they were done statically, but
maintenance nonetheless.  Much better IMO to write a single page that
will degrade gracefully, if you can manage it (though of course
wireless opens us up to a whole new bucket of problems).



=====
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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