
On Connection Speeds and Appropriate Technology - octosphere
http://txti.es/theneedforplaintext
======
rayiner
> However, we now live in the era where a 3MB payload is considered
> acceptable, if not the average, to deliver fundamentally text-based web-
> pages.

The web today is terrible. For general browsing speed, I think the web peaked
for me in 2001 or so. I had a 300 MHz PII, connected via 256 kbps SDSL. It
flew! (Especially in BeOS.) Now, I have a 2x10-core 3.6 GHz Xeon, connected by
2 gbps fiber. It lags! Text pops in after the page has seemingly loaded, like
some circa 1998 3D game. I miss click things because the page reflows after
I've lined up what I want to click on. And these days, you can't even disable
all that JavaScript garbage, because sites just won't work.

And the terribly disappointing thing is that it's not any _better._ It's not
like Engadget is taking up 375MB of memory (six times what I had in my PII)
because its review of the new Surface tablet includes interactive holograms.
It's fundamentally just text and pictures, same as 2001. We will look back on
this era of the web the way we look back on 1970s cars, with V8s getting 12
miles per gallon making just 130 horsepower.

~~~
vlovich123
Well in 2001 you had 1+ Ghz CPUs at the high end being pretty popular with
1600x1200 resolution. If you were using a 300 MHz PII I'm guessing you had a
800x600 monitor attached to it as well (if that). Today, monitors that are
~1900x1200 are common (if not more - 4k & multi-monitor is also really
popular). So for one you're looking at ~5x more memory required for graphical
assets. Probably closer to 6x-9x since 16-bit displays were more common for
the machines your talking about.

The web back then was also a wasteland of bad graphics & terrible UX (things
aren't universally better but they are vastly better). Those all take
advantage of the more compute/memory available today.

Finally, the features available on the web today weren't possible for the web
in 2001. E-commerce is now a given rather than an obscure thing geeks do.
Interactive media/video, video chat, etc are all things that are possible.

Additionally, security has costs. The OS you were running on your 300 MHz PII
was faster because it wasn't properly isolating processes from each other.

You can complain all you want of course but the complaints are pretty "why
can't things stay the way they were" rather than a recognition that
advancement has tradeoffs (e.g. cars are more polluting than horses but it's
revolutionized & democratized travel & made it orders of magnitude more
efficient in a way not possible before).

~~~
rayiner
> Well in 2001 you had 1+ Ghz CPUs at the high end being pretty popular with
> 1600x1200 resolution. If you were using a 300 MHz PII I'm guessing you had a
> 800x600 monitor attached to it as well (if that). Today, monitors that are
> ~1900x1200 are common (if not more - 4k & multi-monitor is also really
> popular).

Your history is off. The PII came out in late 1997. Mine came with a Riva 128,
which did 32-bit color in _3D_. I ran it at 1152x864x32-bit. Typical
resolution back then was 1024x768 (for 15" or 17" monitor) to 1600x1200 (for
21") in True Color. Full HD, which is probably the most common resolution
today (especially because laptops are more common than desktops now), takes
only twice as much memory. And of course, JPG was a thing back then too, and
the size of a JPG increases sub-linearly with resolution/color depth.

> The web back then was also a wasteland of bad graphics & terrible UX (things
> aren't universally better but they are vastly better).

Precisely the opposite. This was the New York Times home page in 2001:
[http://www.versionmuseum.com/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_Ti...](http://www.versionmuseum.com/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_Times_Website#mediaviewer/File:2001_NYTimes.com_homepage.jpg).
Look how easy it was to find where everything was! (Hey, remember when
websites were so deferential to native UI guidelines that they used native
widgets for check boxes and radio buttons? Pepperidge Farm remembers!) The
current website is pretty good, but strictly worse. For example, instead of
distinctly colored, clearly visible section headers as in 2001 ("Inside,"
"Reader's Opinion"), today's site ditches the header background color and uses
text that's smaller than the headline text. That makes the page seem like a
sea of headlines with no obvious section groupings.

HN/Wikipedia is way easier to browse than your typical site today. That's what
the whole web was like back then--just links, text, and images. Maybe some
native text-entry boxes, radio buttons, etc. Not all of this garbage where
stuff is hidden and then suddenly pops up or is behind a hamburger menu,
scrolling is broken by custom JS, text is all replaced with inscrutable icons,
texture/borders/outlines are dropped so groupings can't be identified, etc.

> E-commerce is now a given rather than an obscure thing geeks do. Interactive
> media/video, video chat, etc are all things that are possible.

In 2001, we had Amazon. The website was better than today, with color-
contrasting tabs and headings everywhere. (I'd link a picture, but "copy link
to image" doesn't actually work anymore--another way the web is broken today.)
Yes, fewer people used Amazon back then. That's the result of manufacturing
technology making computers more affordable, not changes in web design.

> Additionally, security has costs. The OS you were running on your 300 MHz
> PII was faster because it wasn't properly isolating processes from each
> other.

Again, your history is off. Even Windows 9x ran most apps in protected mode.
(There were loopholes for compatibility, but those didn't help performance.)
And by 2001, I was running BeOS/Windows 2k on that machine. Windows 2k is
still the best OS Microsoft has ever made.

> You can complain all you want of course but the complaints are pretty "why
> can't things stay the way they were" rather than a recognition that
> advancement has tradeoffs (e.g. cars are more polluting than horses but it's
> revolutionized & democratized travel & made it orders of magnitude more
> efficient in a way not possible before).

Right. Except the modern web isn't a car. It's a horse in drag. Almost all of
the "revolution" has come not from changes in web technology, but (1)
manufacturing advances making computers cheaper/smaller/faster; and (2)
advances in broadband and wireless making connectivity ubiquitous.

------
kemitche
I think I lose more of my time on the daily HN submission about page bloat
than I actually lose on page bloat.

------
zellyn
Everyone loves to compare web pages to Moby Dick (I guess the Bible is out of
vogue). But Moby Dick has pictures, as do web pages.

I know they're still overburdened with crap — mostly advertising — but at
least do the comparisons properly.

~~~
cheezymoogle
Out of the 5.6MB loaded on the front page of the NY Times today, less than 1MB
are images.

~~~
jtbayly
Fine, but the point remains that the article is _way_ off base with its
numbers if it doesn't include images.

"Human factors" certainly must include considering that humans like pictures.
Oh, and videos.

------
styfle
This is a bit of a meta comment (not commenting on the content of the article
but the tech that the website is built on):

[http://txti.es](http://txti.es) seems to have similar goals to
[https://itty.bitty.site](https://itty.bitty.site) but the former appears to
use a database that may or may not delete content. The latter does not store
content so it could potentially live longer.

See this related HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17459204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17459204)

