Webpages showing sharp growth in girth

[brotherhood of LAN]

[bbc.co.uk...]

The average page is now about 965 kilobytes in size, reveals a study of top sites by the HTTP Archive.

...the statistics reveal that the category showing the biggest growth is that for Javascript. This scripting language is widely used to make webpages more interactive and responsive.

Must be jquery and similar libraries.

[rocknbil]

This grates me to no end. Saw one the other day that had twelve open source, point and paste JQuery related libraries for simple menus and a few slideshows and video.

Don't get me wrong, I love jQuery, it's only one library, makes my job 10X faster, and can be optimized. It's all how you use it. But I don't think the major offense is jQuery related technologies, I think it's more graphics. Today's marketers and designers are **obsessed** with the importance of "making it look good." This does not equate to "making it work." I put together a page last week - ONE PAGE - that was over three megabytes. I complained, offered solutions, almost BEGGED, the response?

"It looks really good, awesome job."

:-/

[penders]

I notice this a lot on my mobile browser, which shows the KB as you browse. This frequently tops 1 MB for a single page load and even on WiFi to a fast broadband connection this is slooow on my mobile browser. Another problem with these 'larger' pages is that when I connect via my mobile phone network I am charged by the MB, so it potentially costs me more!

The average page is now about 965 kilobytes in size...

Uncompressed I guess? jQuery itself is just 31 KB compressed (and 90+ KB uncompressed) so I can't see that this itself is necessarily the problem.

bbc article... Ryan Kim at news site Gigaom speculated that the growth in the amount of Javascript on webpage was down to the growing use of HTML5.

Why is HTML5 responsible for a growth in the amount of JavaScript?

[rocknbil]

I'm beginning to see the truth in this (though the increased use of JS is often unrelated to HTML5). I worked with a document the other day that was totally bloated with IE conditionals and Javascript to support older browser types.

The ie 8 html5.js is only a part of the issue, for even older browsers you need even more Javascript to get it to play nicely. This feels like a throwback to the late 90's browser identification chaos. We're really just not ready for HTML5, as soon as I can stop hacking to support older browsers, HTML4/XHTML it is. :-)

[lucy24]

Or, as we say in the vernacular, pages are getting fatter ;)

Want to see a really fat page? Eyeball your logs and pick out a would-be hotlinker. Now set aside five minutes, open the page and look at its source. What you'll see is dozens of original-size illustrations, resized in code to thumbnail size.

I met one the other day-- not a hotlink, I was just snooping-- that had a couple of 3MB images in .bmp format. Really. The mere act of changing them to uncompressed .jpg would have cut them down to 1/10 the previous size. And then further cut by making them the (physical) size specified in the code, and adding a teeny bit of compression.

General principle: Never include one file when six will do. Separate includes for each line of javascript. Separate includes for each vaguely different category of css. Separate includes for any one command that might possibly not be used in two pages of a 10,000 page site.

It is much more fun to pick out the motes in other people's www sites than to deal with the beams in your own.

Edit: Oops. The drawback to "list new posts" is that sometimes you don't notice what forum you're in. But really, the fatness principle isn't limited to javascript. If it works fine on my local machine, why shouldn't it work equally well for people out there on satellite connections?

[rocknbil]

NYE wife and I spent NYE in a mid-priced ocean front hotel. "Free Wi-Fi." Connection was "weak." I wanted to invite my cohorts over to show them how their pages weren't loading, how these issues DO affect their polished pages, but was distracted by a thong . . . .

"We won't be marketing to those people. If they can't afford fast bandwidth to view our site, we don't need their business."

The room was $400, I was browsing from an iPad over WiFi. This is the state of marketing today.

[lucy24]

So if your friends' customers live on vast estates in the middle of nowhere, they pay privately to have the requisite miles of cable run out from the nearest metropolis?

I was only recently introduced to satellite internet in the, er, flesh. I honestly thought they were on dialup-- and my own DSL connection isn't even all that fast.

Start saving your pennies. You are about to find some tasty domain names offered at fire-sale prices ;)