Mugur Padurean wrote:
Hello, reality check here.
Quoting the US and Australian available IT infrastructure, as a good reason
for building huge web pages, is wrong for at least three reasons:
I surely didn't mean to be doing that, please see below.
1. Over 90% percent of the world population do not live there and do not
have dial-up access or other types of network access of such quality.
In Romania where I am living dial-up access it's ... frustrating. So it's
cable sometimes, ADSL if way too expensive and other means of network access
are are inaccessible due to cost or limited area of availability. What about
laptops ? Or wireless access? Both are much slower but in wide spread use.
Did you know in my country you are charged by the megabyte ? Technology is
NOT spread uniformly all over the world, and making your page smaller it's a
better, smarter and fair approach than waiting for the world to "catch up"
with you guys. I'm surprised you don't care but that's another story.
Hi Mugar: glad to have a reality check, especially from Romania. ah, I
care! and I wasn't saying that *I* make big pages, I try to keep mine
really small. That's one reason I still have dial-up, so I don't forget
what its like for everyone else. In the city (small to moderate) I live
in a lot of people have cable. It was a test city early on for their
cable .... I have never used broadband, some for security reasons, but
mainly I don't want to lose touch with how fast things load, or not,
that I'm designing. That said, I hadn't thought very much about how the
IT structure, in general, probably makes a BIG difference in how dial-up
works, so glad to have those thoughts in my brain. I generally connect
at 53K and I bet that may be better than a lot of people on dial-up. I
had known how in most (a lot) of Europe you are charged for download time.
BUT, in this particular site we're discussing, the designer thinks they
are targeting local businesses and they probably have figured that out,
so odds are no one from anywhere else but Australia will even want to
visit this site; and they're targetting businesses which, apparently,
are on broadband. and their html is under 4K, which you have to admit
is pretty slim. and the same graphic is in the background on every
page, so its just one download.
2.Is technology evenly spread in your countries ( US and Australia)? Is
there no place in those countries where Internet access makes you wanna kill
that evil designer that put a 4 Mb flash intro on your favourite site ? I
bet you all live in big cities, don't you ? Lucky guys ..
well, medium size as I said. But, I do think technology is not spread
out evenly, I know its not in Maine (n. U.S.). I think probably most of
the major population areas can get broadband but if you're not in a
"city" its pretty spotty.
3. Australia and U.S are two countries where "going big" with your pages
will cost you more, as in bandwidth cost (etc), and in the end will lead to
loosing clients. Isn't it ?
I think a site has to be really very active for bandwidth costs to kick
in. I know with anything I've ever done it hasn't been an issue; of
course, its something to keep in mind. maybe the newsletters at Maine
Humanities might all of a sudden become wildly popular. :-)
Otherwise we will end up with a web full of 10 Mb pages with embedded
databases, wallpaper backgrounds, tag soup and proprietary technologies ...
oh, wait ... we already have that! Damn ...
Cute.
So, I agree with everything you say as a general principle. I'm 3/4ths
Luddite, after all. its just in this particular case, the separation of
the image from the html - is not building big *pages*. at most it is one
big page but what feels seems different in this instance is that the
image is in the background so the image is not even necessary to see the
page and load the page. Of course, the general principle is that that
contributes to over-all bloat but some people have already said that
e.g. in the case of csszengardens that there are legitimate reasons for
"breaking that rule" - I would just argue the same for this website
(other design problems aside). they know their audience, its local, its
on broadband.
cheers
Donna
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