Columbus wonders which side (if any) he ought to support in the HTML War |
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"Hang on," I hear you cry. "War? Which war? What on Earth are you talking about?!"
The How We Should All Write For The Web War, that's what.
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I absolutely make no claim to being any kind of web expert; far from it. There are plenty of real ones out there (some of whom I'll refer to) and many more wanna-be's. But having spent quite a few years surfing the web, I've already noticed a few unfortunate trends emerging, and a few bad habits that seem to be becoming permanent fixtures.
Although the observations I'll make here can be found echoed elsewhere, I've yet to come across them concisely stated, and clearly summarised in one place, so I thought I'd give it a bit of a go myself! |
Web page design is fiercely debated all over the web itself, in newsgroups, in books, magazines, on TV and even on radio. However, no matter which specific issues are raised, or how bitterly fought over, they all ultimately relate to one of the following:
Let's begin, then, with the technical aspects of this War, and those fighting it, by discussing the practices of intermediate-to-advanced web page authors. (That is to say, authors who have mastered the basics and moved on to develop some kind of a style or philosophy of web page design.)
It seems to me that most authors seem to end up as one of two types. It is the extremists of these two types that responsible for this War. They are at loggerheads with each other over practically everything!
In this corner, Combatant #1
She adores sexy multimedia and definitely sees herself as something of a cyberculture trendsetter. She couldn't care less about those patriarchal 'old fart' established web design principles. They are clichéd, and she is defiantly NOT. Assuming she's even heard of them, she feels that abiding by those fascist WC3 HTML Standards is much too boring, restrictive, anti-creative and a pain in the ass. She's usually the gal still going hungry to pay off her Visa card for her pride and joy, the fastest Pentium III in the neighbourhood :-)
"Wow, don't ya just love multiple nested Frames, that Shockwave stuff and nice big JavaScript applets! Yum, VRML is like, so-o-o-o cool, Man! Hey - after all, it's only people like me, playing with cutting-edge stuff, that keeps the Web evolving into a cooler and cooler place. It's too bad my stuff doesn't seem to run in Netscape ... I wonder what else I can cram onto my pages to impress the guys? Maybe a nice big 360º LivePicture of my driveway? Hmmm, now there's an idea..." |
In the other corner, Combatant #2
He typically has an academic or technical background, and still loves UNIX. His co-workers think of him as "very bright, but a bit of a fuddy-duddy." He is a total believer in the satisfying precision of properly validated HTML. Secretly, he can't help but wistfully yearn for the good ol' text-only days of the Early Web, before the rest of us all impertinently jumped onto the bandwagon. He used to run a BBS in the 1980's, subscribed to by 7 of his like-minded comrades. Look for: glasses, a clipboard, a Macintosh and maybe a beard :-)
"Far too many of these so-called 'Webmasters' are really just geeky poseurs who use way too many graphics and other frivolous multimedia clutter. These bastards are the losers responsible for the present appalling congestion of the 'Net! The purpose of the Web is to efficiently exchange mostly text-based information, and that's what the WC3 Standards are all about. Half of these upstarts have nothing interesting to actually say, anyway! Hrrumph. In my day..." |
Just kidding: I don't mean to offend anybody (much :-), and I'm sure neither you nor I even slightly resemble either of these extreme caricatures, but you get my drift! Both attitudes are defensible, of course, and within their own terms or reference, quite correct.
Which is the more correct, though? Buggered if I really know! That's what the war is all about. Which view do I favour? These days I keep changing sides, to some degree. If I'm brutally honest, though, I think Combatant #2 perhaps represents my tendencies just a teeny bit more of the two, being something of a fuddy-duddy myself!
Having said that, I have to confess that I love cool multimedia as much as the next guy (especially, on occasion, well-done Macromedia Flash), but I loathe and despise the slow and agonising download wait that such content often necessarily entails. Who doesn't? It's for good reason that we've all heard the suggestion that 'WWW' stands for the World Wide Wait!
Even in conventional sites without fancy Flash, etc, I bet you've seen plenty of examples of truly atrocious HTML excesses and abuse, leading to what might be called Web Wank. A typical example, for instance, is the home page with a 600 kB Image Map, which takes forever to painfully load, with no text at all to read in the meantime. By the time it's downloaded, of course, one usually discovers it wasn't worth the wait, and angrily decides never to return to it.
Whole websites could be, and have been, devoted to making fun of such sites, and many of the culprits they pick on deserve all the razzing they get! The most prominent site exposing such transgressors is probably the infamous Web Pages That Suck.
On the other hand, there is very little to get excited about some of the raw ASCII text one sees on a great many technical sites, either. Let's face it, it does seem a pity to disdain any use whatsoever of art or graphics, as if one is some kind of Calvinist party-pooper or something.
It seems to me, as with so many things in life, the answer lies in sensible compromise.
As the Buddha said, "The Middle Way is Golden." In other words: both protagonists in this war are partially right, and should listen to each other, as neither view is completely wrong, either!
I think there is one overwhelming, obvious fact that puts this whole war into perspective, that many people simply overlook: the actual limitations of real-world Internet speeds for the vast majority of people using it! This war is ultimately not about webpage aesthetics at all; it's a question of bandwidth, pure and simple.
The industry's pre-eminent 'web usability' guru, Jakob Nielsen, points out that it will not be until about 2003 that the current woeful speed of the Internet will improve to the point where it will become truly, comfortably usable for the first time, for most people using it. Such improvements to the telecommunications infrastructure enabling this will be expensive and technically difficult, and take until then to occur. (Nielsen's Internet speed increase predictions since 1984 have been very accurate to date, and there is no reason to doubt his judgement in this.)
Admittedly, Nielsen is famous for being an arch 'web minimalist', but he is one for a good reason. He persuasively argues that ideally, pages should currently be under 3 kB in total size, which effectively means no graphics at all, but I think that's rather extreme. It would however mean a page download time of just 1 second, which is the Holy Grail of download speeds ...
It's been experimentally determined that 10 seconds is the limit of a typical visitor's patience when it comes to waiting for a webpage to load. This corresponds to a total page size of 30 kB. Nielsen therefore maintains this should be considered the maximum page size we should aim for, and he has a very good point.
I use a high quality ISP, and my carefully tweaked DUN / modem setup almost always connects at 50667 bps, and usually downloads ftp rock-steady at 4.8 kB / sec. I daresay you too have a V.90 modem and an ISP that supports it. But all that hasn't really changed things all that much on the other end of that erratic phone line yet, out there in the Real World, has it?
In particular, in Australia, broadband Internet access is still some way from becoming a practical reality. Even in the USA, it's largely hype rather than the norm for most people, except for well-heeled 'Power Users', ISPs or IT departments in Universities. In any case, an early 2000 poll revealed that fully 47% of 'Net users still connect at 33.6 kbps or slower. Source: Nielsen//NetRatings.
Around three years from now, the Average Joe using the Internet will actually experience consistent 1 Mb per second connection speeds, instead of the 28.8 kb per second we effectively have today - at least, on a good day!
To put it another way: when that 1 Mbps day finally comes, it will mean even a really big multimedia-laden page coming in from the other side of the world will actually load 35 times faster than it does today, in around one second. We'll be dealing with an entirely different kettle of fish then, with streaming video finally, *actually* working smoothly, and download speeds and page size problems largely just a distant, bad memory. Won't that be nice! Until then, though ...
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There is simply NO getting around the harsh reality of the sluggish 28.8 kbps limit we must accept today, and for the next few years. We must all write our webpages with that brutal and incontestable fact clearly in mind.
« Remember »
every extra 30 kB of content = 10 seconds of extra download time! |
There are a few exceptions to this general rule, of course. (Aren't there always?)
For instance, some sites will always need to have big pictures. Text descriptions of a graphic artist's work don't convey half the meaning that a few pictures can! A few small gifs can dress up a page no end, with relatively little bandwidth penalty. Our site features lots of big pictures, but they are only loaded if specifically requested, via tiny thumbnails.
But for 'a typical site', this means smallish, mostly text pages really must remain the order of the day, whether we like it or not.
If, in spite of everything, a web author insists on his vistors enduring the irritating wait for his huge pages to load, that will always be his choice. However, if heavy multimedia isn't completely justifiable within the raison d'être of his site, he shouldn't be surprised at the price he may pay:
Of course, poorly written text is still poorly written text, no matter how fancy the bells and whistles accompanying it. This brings us to the question of Design and Content, which is another matter altogether, and one that I briefly wrestle with on the next page.
Phew! I feel a lot better, now that I have that off my chest :-) If nothing else, I hope that puts to rest the "big versus little webpage size" debate, once and for all. Disagree? Aaargh! After all that?!
Just kidding - contrary views are always welcome; feel free to email yours to me. Let's hope this war resolves itself without too much bloodshed :-)
Last updated: Tue Jun 22 10:23:28 1999
