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The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

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Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#191

Post by chriswarbo »

bradleyjg wrote: post #174
manaskarekar wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandatory: Benefits from Apollo [PDF] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/80660main_ApolloFS....

This argument proves too much. If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money. The opportunity cost of the Apollo missions were enormous, even if there were positive outcomes that spun out of it. Or to put it more elegantly: "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not…

> The opportunity cost of the Apollo missions were enormous, even if there were positive outcomes that spun out of it.

True, but if you're talking opportunity costs then I see Apollo, and the space race in general, as a great success story. They took the polotical atmosphere of nationalism, paranoia, one-upmanship, costly signalling, etc. and funnelled some of it into exploration, science and engineering at otherwise unthinkable levels.

It it weren't for the space race, it's likely the majority of those resources would be poured into armaments, military-industrial churn, espionage, corruption/lobbying, (proxy) wars, etc.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#192

Post by seanwilson »

Lots of people are focusing on excessive JavaScript and CSS but these combined are easily dwarfed by a single high quality image.

Try visiting Apple's website for example. I can't see how you can have a small page weight if your page includes several images that are meant to look good on high quality screens. You're not going to convince marketing and page designers to go with imageless pages.

Doom's original resolution was 320x200 = 64K pixels in 8-bit colour mode. Even an Apple Watch has 92K pixels and 24-bit colour (three times more space per pixel) now, and a 15" MacBook display shows 5.2M pixels. The space used for high quality images on newer displays is order of magnitudes higher to what Doom hardware had to show.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#193

Post by mod »

CaptSpify wrote: post #157
overcast wrote: post #2

With the majority of users moving towards mobile, I really think this is an issue, and I've been consciously building projects as lean as possible. Removing bloated jquery libraries was a big one. With native calls like document.querySelectorAll document.querySelector I've found I can 90% get by without it. For the rest, using something like vue.js, and I've taken care of all the dom manipulation, data binding, etc.

I lived in $nowheresville, TN for a bit. This drove me insane. Sure, your webapp works great in downtown SF, but try loading it with the spotty connection the rest of the country has, not to mention the rest of the world. One of the places I worked at had a computer hooked up to a ~800 kbps modem, and would test all their web-pages on that. It was really eye-opening, and I wish more companies would benchmark like tha…

Chrome network tools has throttling that can simulate really shitty networks, I use that a fair bit.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#194

Post by arohner »

seanwilson wrote: post #192

Lots of people are focusing on excessive JavaScript and CSS but these combined are easily dwarfed by a single high quality image. Try visiting Apple's website for example. I can't see how you can have a small page weight if your page includes several images that are meant to look good on high quality screens. You're not going to convince marketing and page designers to go with imageless pages. Doom's original resolut…

Images can load progressively, so pure HTML + one large image absolutely can appear faster to the user. The JS and CSS to load a SPA won't. Page weight is a good rule of thumb, but it isn't the be all end all of a good experience.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#195

Post by cinquemb »

manaskarekar wrote: post #177
bradleyjg wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument proves too much. If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money. The opportunity cost of the Apollo missions were enormous, even if there were positive outcomes that spun out of it. Or to put it more elegantly: "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not…

I somewhat agree with what you're saying, but eventually it's hard to prove if one way benefits us more than the other, because the benefits of the Apollo program perhaps influenced the space endeavors that improve our life today. It's definitely debatable and hard to gauge. I just thought I'd throw in the link to show the other side of the argument.

My rule of thumb is that if a goal is thought to be technically possible (although it may have not been done before) and there are people who can execute and have the resources to execute it to any degree, it will probably be done. Especially regardless of anyone else opinion if they are not intimately involved in such processes.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#196

Post by extrapickles »

dkopi wrote: post #122
kevincox wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this argument a lot, and I very much disagree. Now you have browser vendors having to device which libraries are "popular" and shipping them in the initial download of the browser. It turns out that this technology already exists in a much better form. It's called cache. The problem is that almost everyone hosts their own version of jQuery. If everyone simply linked the "canonical" version of jQuery (the CDN l…

The problem with hosting JS libraries on CDNs is that the cache has a network effect. You only gain performance if the browser already has a cached version of this specific version on this specific CDN. If you don't - you end up losing performance, because now an additional DNS lookup needs to be performed, and an additional TCP connection needs to be opened. Here are a few reasons people choose to avoid CDNized vers…

Latency of a new request as mentioned in one of those articles is the main reason why I self host everything.

Since HTTPS needs an extra round trip to startup, it's now even more important to not CDN your libraries. The average bandwidth of a user is only going to go up, and their connection latency will remain the same.

If you are making a SaaS product that business want, using CDNs also make it hard to offer a enterprise on-site version as they want the software to have no external dependencies.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#197

Post by falcolas »

snowwrestler wrote: post #110

The Doom install image was 35x the size of the Apollo guidance computer. Thirty-five times! Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game. My point of course is that these comparisons are not actually that illuminating. Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes. This presentation very capably talks about that problem: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Do…

Doom was created for entertainment. Web pages are (typically) created for entertainment. The guidance computer was created for calculating trajectories.

IMO, Doom and Web pages are remarkably close in terms of purpose and required assets, and the comparison is apt. Especially when you can play Doom on a web page...

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#198

Post by komali2 »

Eerie wrote: post #166
snowwrestler wrote: post #110

The Doom install image was 35x the size of the Apollo guidance computer. Thirty-five times! Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game. My point of course is that these comparisons are not actually that illuminating. Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes. This presentation very capably talks about that problem: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Do…

>Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game. How many millions of man-hours Apollo project wasted for a PR stunt?

Even if you could argue that Apollo was nothing more than a "PR Stunt", what is the issue with it being that? From a nationalism perspective, there's a tremendous advantage to be gained from plugging an entire generation with patriotism from a moon landing.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#199

Post by CaptSpify »

detaro wrote: post #179
CaptSpify wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of the mindset that our browsers are built backwards. For "content-oriented" sites, we should present text, and give the users tools in their browsers to present them as the user sees fit. Instead, we expect the site to design it. Something like Firefox Reader View. Some people may like bettermotherfuckingwebsite better, but I personally don.t "presentation-oriented" sites are a different story, of course

Basic styles don't mess with Reader View or other customization, so I don't see a large downside to include them, they just make it nicer for people not using such tools. Unless the point is to get people to use different tools?

> Unless the point is to get people to use different tools?

Kind of. I dream of an Internet where people have their own CSS/styles, and they can make it look how they want, rather than how the website wants it. I think of it like this: I'm a linux guy. I want my tools to output plainly to stdout. If I want to format them, I'll pipe them into my own formatting tools. I wish websites worked that way as well.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#200

Post by jmcqk6 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #174
manaskarekar wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandatory: Benefits from Apollo [PDF] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/80660main_ApolloFS....

This argument proves too much. If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money. The opportunity cost of the Apollo missions were enormous, even if there were positive outcomes that spun out of it. Or to put it more elegantly: "Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not…

>If we wanted better sneaker materials or retractable football stadium roofs surely we could have accomplished those tasks for far less money.

The problem with this type of attitude is that discovery doesn't work like this. Incremental improvements can sometimes work this way, but big discoveries do not. If there had been a mandate to "find a way to communicate without wires" I'm going to guess that it would not have gotten very far. Instead, this came about as a side effect of pure science research.

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