Notes

Does it Really Need all That?



Media

I've already touched on how pictures can occupy quite a bit of space however, when they serve a function in relation to the main content of the page and don't occupy too much data they can be justified. Videos are not allowed on web pages that are text-based. I hate it when I click on an interesting headline on a news website and am taken to a short article which is accompanied by a video from their morning show. It consumes more bandwidth, and I don't care. But an argument can be made in this kind of scenario however there is no argument that pages have some sort o video playing for no reason.
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We've probably all been to websites that featured the largest high definition spinning globe or something at the top We may have looked at it for a half second, and our brain might have thought, "Hey, that's cool," but a second later we scroll down to read whatever we were looking for, we did not go to the site to look at the background, we came there to read the actual content that the site has to offer. Why should the background of a site consume more data than the content we're actually viewing? If the web page wasn't well-designed, it is possible that your browser is constantly downloading the same six second video. Ceglowski suggested that if a site looks nice with images of President William Howard Taft rather than whatever other pictures or videos the designers would like to use, they should include photos of Taft instead.





Tablet Accessibility

I don't believe in tablets, and I don't use them like other people do and therefore I'm not going to spend all day discussing them, but tablets are great for some people. The way websites are presented changed dramatically after iPads were introduced. They were once simple and unimportant buttons were styled and expanded, and the most popular ones are the ones you use the least often. I'm thankful that I'm not a web designer since designing websites that work well on all sorts of hardware isn't a lot of fun.





Ads

I have only discussed things that are out of the developer's control. However, when a page is populated with ads, there is no way for designers to know if the page they spent hours enhancing and designing is still amazing and perform well. A 3MB page could be loaded with a 50MB advertisement.



In his presentation Ceglowski showed this graph that displays (based off of 2015 US average cost per byte of internet bandwith) a comparison of how much money it costs a user to pull up advertisements on various websites vs. the actual content of those sites. It's clear that ads not only take up time and risk from computer viruses, but they also cost us money in internet bandwidth. (There's another reason to consider using an ad blocker) (Of course this sort of graph only applies to primaily text based sites, if this graph had included YouTube the entry would have been able to boast a more reasonable ad to content ratio)



I could go on and on about ads but I'm sure that we all do, so I won't bore you more.





Two paths

Ceglowski displayed two screenshots of video games towards the end of his presentation.



Minecraft is a fairly basic game, and it's not an attractive game, but it is a platform for endless creativity.



Call of Duty games are always being diveloped to provide the best graphics and increasingly compelling gameplay, but they require much more resources to run, and at the end of the day they aren't able to stand out from other games in their genre.



We want the internet to be more similar to Minecraft. We would like to see more innovative and original things being created with less than what we're used to doing with more.





What should I be learning

I realize that I nor anyone likely to read this will have much of an impact on the future of the internet, we are likely to be compelled to access bloated sites but we ought to be looking for ways to eliminate the bloat from other areas of our lives. Is it worth spending $500 more on a car that has backup cameras? You're better off turning around to back up. Is it worth spending $1.25 more to get a scoop of guacamole in your burrito? You can buy an entire avacado for much less. Are you really wasting your time? You could be doing more productive activities in your life.


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