#page weight

[jkresearch]

Let me start by saying that beautiful websites come in all sizes and page weights. I love big websites packed with images. I love high-resolution video. I love sprawling Javascript experiments or well-designed web apps. This talk isn't about any of those. It's about mostly-text sites that, for unfathomable reasons, are growing bigger with every passing year. While I'll be using examples to keep the talk from getting too abstract, I’m not here to shame anyone, except some companies (Medium) that should know better and are intentionally breaking the web.

[denyinghipster]

Build for modern browsers. Test your work in those and make sure the experience for an up to date browsers is as you want it. Then look at the problems you have, alongside your policy in terms of what you are delivering to older browsers, and see what you need to fix those issues. There is some amazing work out there in terms of polyfills, frameworks and libraries. However you don’t have to use them, and in many cases won’t need to use them. So make sure every bit of code added to your project is there for a reason you can explain, not just because it is part of some standard toolkit or boilerplate.

Stop solving problems you don't yet have

[denyinghipster]

your web developers are treating the web like an app platform when your very business hinges on it being a quick, lightweight media platform with a worldwide reach.

Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web – Baldur Bjarnason

[denyinghipster]

Circumventing the web is not a viable solution for most companies—it’s merely punting on the problem. The web continues to be the medium with the highest capacity for reach—it’s the medium that can get into all the little nooks and crannies of the world better than any other. That’s important. It’s important for business, and it’s important for the people who need it to access content online. It’s unfair, and frankly a bit naive and narcissistic, to expect anyone who wants to read your articles or buy from your company to A) be using a specific sort of device and then B) go and download an app onto that device to accomplish their goal. The reach and openness of the web well worth preserving.

Choosing performance - TimKadlec.com

[denyinghipster]

Business development deals have created problems that no web developer can solve. There’s no way to make a web page with a full-screen content-obscuring ad anything other than a shitty experience.

Daring Fireball: Peter-Paul Koch: 'Radical Simplification' the Answer for the Mobile Web

[denyinghipster]

There needs to be a cultural change in how we approach building for the web. Yes, some of the tools we choose are part of the problem, but the bigger problem is that performance still isn’t being recognised as the most important factor in how people feel about websites (and by extension, the web). This isn’t just a developer issue. It’s a design issue. It’s a UX issue. It’s a business issue. Performance is everybody’s collective responsibility.

Adactio: Journal—Instantiation

[denyinghipster]

We’ve known for a while that a fast-loading site makes for a better user experience, but with this update it also means Google’s indexing system now explicitly favors faster-loading sites over slower ones.

An Excellent Week · An A List Apart Blog Post

[dragoni]

I had intended to write about the results of Radware’s new EEG research into mobile usability, but I just realized that the HTTP Archive recently celebrated its third anniversary (happy birthday, HTTP Archive! Your card is in the mail!), making this a good time for our semi-annual look at page size and composition.

As you may or may not know, we’ve been reporting on the HTTP Archive data for the top 1,000 sites since the Archive’s inception in 2010. Over the years, we’ve learned one thing, definitively…

Pages keep getting bigger. And bigger. AND BIGGER.

1. The average top 1,000 web page is 1575 KB.

2. More than half of this size is due to images.

3. Flash is on the decrease. Custom fonts are on the increase.