Bye-bye bloat
Back when bandwidth was precious and rare, pages were built to load fast (much time spent leaning out JPEGs to find the balance between acceptable image quality and download speed).
Then broadband and other fat pipes got cheap(er), and it appears that web-page jockeys then threw in any and all gew-gaws into webpages without a care to weighing them before setting them live. Video on news sites is important (and beefy), as are security precautions on banking ones, but the rest of the lard? Nah.*
Now my colleague tells me that with the immense usage of mobile devices, webpages must again be writ lean and mean so that the devices' batteries don't get sucked to 'E' trying to load the latest eyecandy to decorate a news article.
This would be a welcome development, but as a quick "view source" on too many pages will show, that day has not yet arrived. When the text of a news article comprises 20 percent of the page code -- the rest of the words being/doing dawg-knows-what -- we have a problem, Houston.
* I don't begrudge publishers putting up adverts to pay their expenses, but I DO object to huge-ass animation and other files that eat up download time without adding anything useful to their message. If I am not in the market for product XYZ, all the blinking bold font on the planet will not help.
Rant over, carry on.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
