Notes

Does it Really Need all That?



Media

I've already discussed how pictues can take up lots of space however, so long as they serve a purpose with respect to the main content of the page, and don't take up too much data, they are excuseable. Videos are rarely acceptable for web pages with text. I am annoyed when I click on an intriguing headline on a news site and am redirected to a brief article which is accompanied by a clip from their morning show. It consumes too much bandwidth and I don't care. However, an argument could be made in this kind of situation however there is no argument that pages contain some type of video playing indefinitely.



I'm sure we've all visited a site which had a big high definition spinning globe or something at the top, we probably even glanced at it for half a second and something in our brain may have even 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 gaze at the background, we went there to read the actual content the site offers. Why is it that the background of a website take up exponentially more data than the content we're actually reading? If the website wasn't well-designed it is possible that your browser is continually downloading the same six second video. Ceglowski suggested that if a website looks good with pictures of President William Howard Taft rather than the other images or videos that designers would like to see to include, then they should include images of Taft instead.





Tablet Accessibility

I don’t believe in tablets. I don’t use them in the same way as other users. Therefore, I don't spend a lot of time talking to them. However, tablets are great for a few people. When iPads came out, websites began to evolve initially simple and unimportant buttons were expanded and styled and of course, the most elegant ones are the ones that you use the least often. I'm thankful that I'm not a web-designer because designing sites to work well on all sorts of hardware isn't a lot of fun.





Ads

I have only discussed things that are not under the developer's control. But once a page has ads, there is no way for a designer to determine if the page they spent hours optimizing and designing is still great and perform well. A fairly standard 3MB page could be loaded up with a blatant 50 MB advertisement.
TIME


Ceglowski shared this graph, based on the 2015 US average cost per bybyte of internet bandwidth. It shows the amount it costs to display advertisements on different websites, in comparison to the actual content. It's clear that advertisements not only cost us time and safety from computer viruses, but also cost us money in internet bandwidth. (There's another good argument for using an ad blocker) (Of course, this type of graph only applies to websites that are primarily text-based If this graph included YouTube the entry would have had a much more reasonable ad to content ratio)



I could go endlessly about ads but I'm sure you're all. So I won't bore you with it.





Two paths

At the end of his presentation Ceglowski presented two screenshots of video games.



Minecraft is a relatively basic game, it isn't a very pretty game, but it's an endlessly creative platform.



Call of Duty is continuously being developed to offer the best graphics and compelling gameplay. However they require more resources to run, and don't really stand out from other games of the genre.



We want the internet to be more like Minecraft. We would like to see more innovative and original things being done without the expense of what we are used to doing with more.





What should I do?

I am aware that neither I nor anyone likely to read this article will have an impact on the future of the internet. We are likely to be forced to access bloated sites however, we ought to be looking for ways to eliminate the bloat from other areas of our lives. Is a built in backup camera really worth paying an extra $500 for a new car? You're safer if you turn around to back up. Is it worth spending $1.25 more to have a scoop of guacamole in your burrito? It's not, you can buy an entire avacado for less than $1.25. Is TV worth your time? No, you could be doing more productive things with your time.


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