On most forums, folks are courteous enough to post warnings on threads that are image-heavy and therefore very resource-consuming to people on 56k and slower connections.The only problem is, if you look at what the Web has become, it seems like a pretty unnerving and plodding ordeal for people on dial-up. I’m running on a spritely cable connection, and some of the stuff out there takes awhile to load up for me, so I can’t imagine how heinous it must be for someone on a modem.
On the radio last Friday, I heard that the governments in most of Europe and Asia provide connections that are even faster than cable to all their citizens. It’s a sad fact that America lags so far behind on that.
Looking at my own site, I’m reminded just how many images I use, and that the kind of bandwidth I probably suck down would have been considered heretical ten years ago. Nowadays, a page with ~2MB of images is nothing out of the ordinary.
But does that make it right, though?
In a way, it harkens back to the debate that took place between developers over the proprietary tags that Netscape and IE3 tried to push on the market years back (you may be too young to remember, but these things were once important). You had to run two browsers, because you had pages “best viewed in Netscape” and pages “best viewed in Internet Explorer.”
And of course, God forbid you were using something like Amaya or Lynx.
The tags were non-standard and broke compatibility, and what’s more, they were just bad form. There are standards for HTML and CSS authoring, but since anyone with a computer can be an author these days, they’ve been ignored, and the result is stylistic anarchy.
I won’t even begin to get into things like spelling and grammar. I just won’t.
Anyhow, it should be considered good form to take readers on slower connections into account, and to tailor our content more effectively. What’s more, reducing images, sounds and other bloat enforces a certain stylistic efficiency. I guess the real question is, should we still bother when 99.9% of the community doesn’t?
I already know the answer, I suppose. We should. But then again, my site’s got about 2GB worth of files, so I’m not really one to talk. Still, food for thought.