- To repeat a suggestion I made on Twitter, I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature.
This is a generous yardstick. I could have picked French literature, full of slim little books, but I intentionally went with Russian novels and their reputation for ponderousness.
In Goncharov's Oblomov, for example, the title character spends the first hundred pages just getting out of bed. If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big.
That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew.
For a single tweet.
Or consider this 400-word-long Medium article on bloat, which includes the sentence:
"Teams that don’t understand who they’re building for, and why, are prone to make bloated products."
The Medium team has somehow made this nugget of thought require 1.2 megabytes. That's longer than Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s psychological thriller about an impoverished student who fills his head with thoughts of Napoleon and talks himself into murdering an elderly money lender.
Racked by guilt, so rattled by his crime that he even forgets to grab the money, Raskolnikov finds himself pursued in a cat-and-mouse game by a clever prosecutor and finds redemption in the unlikely love of a saintly prostitute.
Dostoevski wrote this all by hand, by candlelight, with a goddamned feather.
Thank you steve for shouting me out. I actually wrote a rant about this on Designer News not too long ago when some developers were ranting about how terrible Opera Mini support is for new features. They couldn't understand why people (especially people in developing countries) would use a browser and how it's such a huge pain. Here's what I wrote: --- Warning: anecdotal evidence incoming. I find that outside the US you are much more likely to use Opera mini - not necessarily just in developing countries. I have a few friends in Europe who love it specifically because of features that allow them to better control loading content and large images. In the US, capped data or limited data is not as big of a deal. For example, I'm on a family plan where we have never once gotten close to hitting our 10gb shared plan. However, one of my friends overseas has 500mb /month and has told me his becomes anxious whenever clicking links (even to news articles and the likes) because they may burn through 3mbs or 4mbs or 10mbs of data for that single page. He's a bit of an urban explorer and Google Maps and routes takes the majority of his monthly internet usage. Another friend in Australia has a data plan for his phone (500mb) and a USB dongle (2gb) for his computer. He lives about an hour outside of Sydney where you essentially have to pay a huge upfront cost to get a real internet line (not DSL) to your house. He is renting and won't be there much longer and therefore opts for the no-upfront-cost dongle. Maybe some Australians here can explain better how / why this is as I don't feel like going into it. Basically, infrastructure is a big issue. When you have a country the same size as the US with a fraction of the population, infrastructure costs shoot up. As developers, the feature support on Opera Mini is one thing we should be aware of (I am certainly guilty as fuck of ignoring browser tests for all versions of Opera) but we should be more aware of how large a page is. I had the same anxiety that my friend had spoken of when I traveled across Asia and Europe on pre-paid sim cards this year. Since free Wi-Fi isn't as readily available, I honestly avoided going to Designer News so that I would avoid the links that we link to and avoid large page loads on the tiny amount of data I had. Let's take a look at 5 random links on designer news right now: http://bitsofco.de/wtf-opera-mini/ - 920.3kB http://rightfontapp.com/?utm_source=designernews - 3.3MB http://blog.framerjs.com/posts/seamless-scale-sketch-framer.html?utm_source=designernews - 5.8MB https://medium.com/muzli-design-inspiration/funniest-animated-gifs-of-the-week-854bacf37261#.n8wei0r8x (at least the title of this one gives you a hint you shouldn't click it if you have limited data) - 59.0MB https://www.pagecloud.com/?utm_source=dn&utm_medium=sp&utm_campaign=1215&utm_source=designernews - 14.4MB That gives us ~83.5mb for 5 LINKS! So lets say I visit 5 designer news links per day. DN itself is 1.0mb. That means in less than 6 days and less than 30 links, I will have blown through my data plan IF I HAVE DONE LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE ON MY PHONE TO USE DATA. Even if we take the horrible gif outlier out, we are still averaging 6.125mb/link. That allows us 81.6 links per month (about 2-3 links per day) before poof! data is gone. Designer News specifically links to pages with higher page weight as they are often filled with high resolution images, big javascript libraries, etc. But the average page across the modern web is still approximately 3mb these days which means I'm allowed to visit 5.5 pages per day to stay within my 500mb plan. Again, that's assuming I literally don't use my phone for anything else data related ever. What sucks even more is news sites, like NYTimes etc, are now getting up there as well. Here's a NY Times Magazine Article that is 4.5MB. Here's a medium article that clocks in a 2.8mb. So basically, feature support is important. But for those in countries that don't have unlimited (or essentially unlimited) internet access, Opera Mini's data saver features are incredibly useful. --- Anyways, I was speaking into the void over at Designer News because they are designers and a few are doing web development but none of them give a shit about performance or keeping page loads down. They would rather shoot their pages to the moon and use massive javascript libraries than learn how big their pages are. This article is hysterical though—and I am so glad he differentiates between text-based sites and regular sites. The reality is, an agency's website and the NYTimes have vastly different target demographics and purposes. If the agency's website is large and full of hi-res photos, that's actually okay, as long as they aren't marketing to people who are on a slow connection or capped data plan. But all the blogs and especially news sites need to shave their shit down. For this reason, later in the article when he talks about Apple's website, I have to laugh. Apple's target demographic is not for people with capped data plans. Their target demo is affluent people with unlimited data plans. Favorite Lines: This guy has good points but the reality is....shit ain't going to change. As data becomings faster and we have more of it, it's only going to be worse. Now, I need to drink more water and update all the footers on my static sites to 2016.Making networks faster makes this problem worse.
Does your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?
In Goncharov's Oblomov, for example, the title character spends the first hundred pages just getting out of bed.
Family plans just aren't a thing around here. Most people I know have an individual Internet bundle with the majority in the 250mb - 1GB range. Which means that most people only use data for social media, WhatsApp and navigation because anything else and boom your bundle is gone. Only in the last year or so has it become normal for new plans to have 1GB by default and 2 to 6 GB for the more data-hungry. But it'll be a while before everyone's made the jump because of all the 2-year contracts out there (and ubiquitous free wifi, too). My current plan - 250MB, €30/mo, phone included in plan - is almost coming to an end and I cannot wait when it's April and my €15 3GB sim-only plan starts.
Minimalism being my life-long philosophy, when I started to build my website on my laptop (so as to be ready to launch it whenever I finally have the resources to, of course), I've it an important point to keep the size to the minimum. I had to skip jQuery in favor of native JS functions of DOM interaction. As I built it up, the question arose of how much to make cool (various entry animations in the project pages and other small improvements that may otherwise eat up the traffic) versus how much to keep simple. Naturally, most of the pages were meant to be text, so there's little point in loading massive scripts like jQ for them. But then, there's tucked-in navigation, images necessary (like my photograph, which is simply a must for such an inward introvert like myself) and stuff that requires even a bit of coding (a string or so of JS). Any general advice on the matter? Any free online courses for a beginner designer to take?