Interesting Morris Worm connection! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
#12The best thing about old site designs is for me their small footprint. The whole payload of viaweb is 62.5kb, a nice size for fitting in the 64kbps of ISDN. Why do I think this is relevant today? In many countries like Germany for example it is common to have a mobile traffic upper limit around between 200mb and 512mb per month. After that you only get GPRS. Use your smartphone for a week with only 2G (53.6kbps), to…
The irony is that nowadays we have better tools than ever to build small footprint sites, thanks to HTML5 & CSS3. We have versatile native HTML controls supporting styling; CSS gives us gradients, box-shadows, rounded borders, etc, eliminating the need for bitmaps. Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.
Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.
Because it isn't as important. If there were all the time in the world, we'd all be able to make our web sites as small as possible, but in reality, it's just not necessary. Yes, there are minorities of users that need it, and depending on what market you're in it could be important. But for most people it isn't.
Re: Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
#13looks like a mobile site from 2010
Re: Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
#14I'm surprised by how good the copy is.
>Viaweb Store is the fastest, easiest way to open an online store. You create your site on our server, using nothing more than the browser you're using to read this page. So you can build a store and start taking orders in minutes.
"Start taking orders in minutes" is better than the above the fold copy on shopify.com if you ask me.
Re: Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
#15Re: Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
#16The best thing about old site designs is for me their small footprint. The whole payload of viaweb is 62.5kb, a nice size for fitting in the 64kbps of ISDN. Why do I think this is relevant today? In many countries like Germany for example it is common to have a mobile traffic upper limit around between 200mb and 512mb per month. After that you only get GPRS. Use your smartphone for a week with only 2G (53.6kbps), to…
The irony is that nowadays we have better tools than ever to build small footprint sites, thanks to HTML5 & CSS3. We have versatile native HTML controls supporting styling; CSS gives us gradients, box-shadows, rounded borders, etc, eliminating the need for bitmaps. Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.
I believe it has something to do with importing the 20 analytics dependencies required to appear SRS BSNS.
Re: Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
#17"Browsers then (IE 6 was still 3 years in the future) had few fonts and they weren't antialiased. If you wanted to make pages that looked good, you had to render display text as images."
Ironically - Apple still does this on apple.com. Most of their large nice looking text is actually an image.
Re: Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
The irony is that nowadays we have better tools than ever to build small footprint sites, thanks to HTML5 & CSS3. We have versatile native HTML controls supporting styling; CSS gives us gradients, box-shadows, rounded borders, etc, eliminating the need for bitmaps. Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.
Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story. Because it isn't as important. If there were all the time in the world, we'd all be able to make our web sites as small as possible, but in reality, it's just not necessary. Yes, there are minorities of users that need it, and depending on what market you're in it could be important. But for most people it isn't.
It's actually important in two major ways. First, conversion rates have been known to increase in correlation with site speed [1]. Second, mobile devices are often on terrible connections.
1: http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-load...
Re: Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
#19I'm surprised by how good the copy is. >Viaweb Store is the fastest, easiest way to open an online store. You create your site on our server, using nothing more than the browser you're using to read this page. So you can build a store and start taking orders in minutes. "Start taking orders in minutes" is better than the above the fold copy on shopify.com if you ask me.
Yeah! That's the first thing I noticed. I'm sure PG has written that.
Re: Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
#20Continuous deployment! In your face, Agile! :)