[Sigia-l] The New Nielsen?

[Simon Willison]

At 19:28 16/07/2002 -0400, Listera wrote:
>The solution to this is not to ask for the abolishment of Flash or, dare I
>say, across the board improvement of the S/N of the HTML page. The average
>'weight' of a web unit (page) has been steadily increasing, and will do so
>in the future.

I apologise if this is getting off topic, but I have to disagree. The 
principle reason many web pages are so "bulky" these days is the need to 
support outdated browsers such as Netscape 4. Getting a design to look 
"right" in NS4 requires a surprisingly large amount of extra markup - 
nested tables, additional font tags and the like. Now that NS4 is /finally/ 
beginning to drop completely off the radar web developers have the option 
to start using new techniques revolving around CSS< which can drastically 
reduce the amount of markup needed to render a complex layout. In addition, 
while this new found optimisation will evidently leave people more willing 
to add heavier images and flash files to their sites, the attitude of the 
average surfer is changing. While people were quite willing to wait 45 
seconds to a minute for a page to load a few years ago, tolerance to such 
delays is now much lower. As designers realise that striking designs can be 
achieved with an ever smaller footprint I think we will see overall page 
sizes reduce rather than increase, despite the prevalence of broadband in 
many countries.

Regards,

Simon Willison
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/