Big Fat Websites (2021)

And this blog actually loads fast and does not require me to trust random third-party scripts to be able to see text. Good job!

> One thing we need to understand when building websites optimised for reading is that text is small. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a pretty thick book by most measures, and only clocks in at about 500kb of text. How is it that this review of 1/18th of the book on Medium is 5.4 times the size of the entire book?

I copy-pasted the HTML source for the review in a new file and it's 20kb. So if it was a full review it would be a 360kb file. Uncompressed, unlike epub files. Once compressed it is ~6kb. 6kb*18 = 108kb. I wouldn't read a book review that is 1/5th of the original material or I wouldn't call it a book review but I digress.

Anyway, should we include the e-reader's viewer code to know how much information is used to display the book and compare it to the CMS's code or the code of the full page of the review to compare... what ?

Where does the "1/18th of the book" come from?

The medium article has a "(18/52)" in the title, but that rather seems to indicate that the article is number 18 in a series of 52 (weekly book reviews in a year or so).

Here's the code: https://ctxt.io/2/AADgpNP9FA for the review.

Now I do agree with you, Medium uses way too much data around its core content.

Hum, "blogs" in the past means "web logs" or a place to publish your personal sh^wcra^wehmmmm things you want someone else to know... I think the author intend for blogs "personal websites" witch sometimes have only one topic, sometimes few. I argue how they can be called blog and their substantial purpose.

In the past, usenet pre-web era, there was a problem: some posts are just noise so there were not much reasons to pin them in some way, some are valuable and might be useful in the future to anyone including those who join a group after that post(s). So websites was seen as a way to keep useful contents for the posterity. Than someone observe the old mundaneum dream [1] can be real with web tech and a new revolution start ending up not so well, composition is still manual and have many issues, accessing contents was a problem, directory-website prove to be nor effective nor maintainable. Than search engines arrives. Another revolution with another loss of the original web idea ... finally blogs arrives as a way to collect data about people letting them spit some mostly irrelevant content to nearly anyone on the web.

I favor rediscovering the classic idea, perhaps the mid-classic one: personal websites with domain names, perhaps hosted at home and mirrored on ZeroNet for all who can, perhaps offering a local YaCy instance to contribute to an open web search to reduce hyper-power of corporate backed search engines, perhaps hosting something else for individual users usage from mail+webmail, VoIP services etc i.e. pushing the classic "home-server" concept since now most of the connected users can do that, can profit from that, at a little enough price, but please let's agree not only to simple script-less fast-loading without CDNs etc contents, also to kind of publishing. To avoid create another niche we new old web must be useful like:

- some personal information made public, why a phone directory? If I have phone numbers to be published I put them on my website because accessing it must be just looking for my name and surname + eventual other tag/words in case of homonymy;

- some topics I want to publish, with proper RSS feeds because 99% of the reader are mildly interested in a small percentage of the content so will not came back frequently to discover something new, they might just get it in their own "inbox" by a lighter mean than an email, or perhaps not having aliases by a mean that do not demand a mail/alias to retrieve contents;

- support for various media, not only desktop and mobile but also scrapers, screen readers, terminals etc, a website must be used ok-ish with w3m.

Long story short instead of a crapload of contents lets makes personal websites like our public face to the web, with all non-web hooks of the case, like RSS.

We need such tools to made a social society without social networks, but still modern.

[1] The ~1930 web based on cards and telegraphs depicted and partially made by Paul Otlet and Henry La Fontaine