lucy24 - 10:08 pm on Jan 8, 2013 (gmt 0)

but indeed there are oodles of them

No ###. Quick detour to page source and text editor turns up 76 <img tags, at a rate of 4 per post plus all those tweetbuttons at the bottom and assorted logos and ads along the top. Would anyone notice if they all disappeared? Maybe not consciously, but I think there's a little bit of a subliminal effect.

There are also 142 "color" tags and 78 ::cough-cough:: "bgcolor". I think this is just as significant, because there's a further huge difference between a page that has no images and a page that looks as if it came out of a typewriter.