I think most of the problem is from images. Images, and especially videos, take up way more space than text. The Russian novel comparison is somewhat misleading in that regard.
But it shouldn't really be an issue because of progressive image loading. At the very least, the text should always load first. Back when I had dialup, it could take ages for a page to load completely because of the images. You could watch them slowly fill in, line by line. And if you didn't care about them, you could ignore them.
There's also now FLIF, which progressively loads images at higher and higher resolutions as more of the file downloads: http://flif.info/ The images look very good even at like 10%. Ideally once the image gets to the desired resolution, it wouldn't download any more of it. So it covers resizing issues too.
> But it shouldn't really be an issue because of progressive image loading. At the very least, the text should always load first. Back when I had dialup, it could take ages for a page to load completely because of the images. You could watch them slowly fill in, line by line. And if you didn't care about them, you could ignore them.
I remember the dial-up days too. You could only read the text around the images while waiting for the images to load.
Now we sort of have the opposite problem when pages use huge unnecessary web fonts; you can only look at the images while waiting for the font to load so the browser can render the text.
(I found sending fonts.googleapis.com to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file helped a lot in that regard. Wish my browser had an option to block all fonts, though.)
FLIF looks like cool tech, but I won't hold my breath until it has wide browser support.
I will agree with you that web fonts are the stupidest thing ever. There seems to be some extensions to block them, though I haven't tried it yet. I don't know why the text isn't rendered normally until the font downloads, or why common fonts aren't cached locally.
Becuase web developers deliberately work around that (color text white or hide it) so the text doesn't display until font is loaded to avoid the text pop. Of course that makes the site unusable if font CDN is down.
The Russian novel comparison is indeed completely unfair. If Crime and Punishment was served by today's web publisher, the contextual ads for money lenders, lawyers, adult services and what-not would of course inflate the size of the page to hundreds of megabytes, significantly exceeding the size of the tiny pages shamed by the unfair comparison!
To his credit, he did make the point of most images and videos being superfluous in most pages, and of them wasting battery and bandwidth, even if they do so after the text was rendered.
I have no idea what your point is. If Crime and Punishment was illustrated, then it would take way more space. A single picture might take up more space than the entire book. It's just the reality digital images. And if you don't want images, well then you don't have to wait until they download.
He does make the point that most images are unnecessary. But then he puts dozens of unnecessary images into his web page! Even he doesn't follow that advice.
But it shouldn't really be an issue because of progressive image loading. At the very least, the text should always load first. Back when I had dialup, it could take ages for a page to load completely because of the images. You could watch them slowly fill in, line by line. And if you didn't care about them, you could ignore them.
There's also now FLIF, which progressively loads images at higher and higher resolutions as more of the file downloads: http://flif.info/ The images look very good even at like 10%. Ideally once the image gets to the desired resolution, it wouldn't download any more of it. So it covers resizing issues too.