[Sigia-l] The New Nielsen?

[Simon Willison]

At 20:39 16/07/2002 -0400, Listera wrote:
>"Simon Willison" wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
>While the markup code portion of web page weight may have increased, I'm
>absolutely convinced that that's not the sole reason why. The web has gotten
>increasingly and steadily more graphical and un-static. I could cite other
>considerations, but it would suffice just to mention audio and video
>streaming. 4-5 years ago there was very little of it today it's all over the
>place. Bytes transferred via streaming obviously dwarf any NN4 code bloat
>you mention. The overall trend is clear: more audio, more video, more
>graphics, more interaction, more data, etc. Unless, of course, your name is
>J Nielsen and someone paid you to say otherwise, this week. :-)

I agree completely - the amount of bandwidth used by the average surfer is 
up and will keep going up (and that's even before you take things like file 
sharing in to consideration). If that was the point of the original message 
then I apologise for missing it. That said, I stick by my opinion that 
average page weight (and by page I mean good old fashioned content, none of 
this horrible multimedia malarkey) will go down. I'm one of those old 
fashioned web surfers who avoids streaming video (it never seems to work 
acceptably even on a super fast connection) and skips Flash whenever 
possible - I surf for words and the occasional picture, so the size of 
normal, boring HTML pages is what concerns me.

> > 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.
>
>You're on; that's a bet then. As long as it's not English beer. :-)

Will Irish (Guinness) do?

Cheers,

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