1. A website's value is the amount of information that it provides to the end user. I would argue that the entirety of the works of Shakespeare or the 1911 Brittanica Encyclopedia provides more information than a high-definition picture of Donald Trump grimacing at EU leaders or an autoplaying ad for Doritos Locos Tacos NEW AT TACO BELL. As far as supplemental uses, at the end of the day, people are using plaintext to communicate with other people. Images and videos are secondary. If that ever changes, then society is already doomed as literacy is fundamental to the maintenance of technology.
2. Raw text is the highest value data/information return that can be transmitted over the internet. There's a reason that Morse Code and APRS are still around: they're reliable, appropriate tech, and require little to no middlemen outside of the transceivers themselves.
3. If wantonly (namely, for no enduringly good reason) increasing the amount of entropy in the universe isn't tautologically bad to you, then I really doubt that any argument would sway you to the contrary.
Concerning the relative value of HTML and CSS, yes, you could argue that UX matters in that department, but even the most bloated static HTML/CSS page is going to pale dramatically in comparison to the size of what's considered acceptable throughput today.
1. Well how is the format of plaintext the best method of getting information to the end user? What if you added a thin indexing layer on top of the plaintext? That would allow people to jump through huge documents with ease, but it's no longer plaintext. Sounds more valuable to me. Where is the line? What's the ideal?
2. Fair enough
3. Referencing "increasing the entropy in the universe" isn't a good argument because the amount of entropy increase due to humans is much, much less than how much entropy is increased by particles being blasted out of all the stars in the universe (unless I fundamentally misunderstand what entropy is). I think that stars blasting out particles is a much larger contributor to entropy than humans not using computer bits effectively.
And also what does entropy as a concept have to do with anything, anyway? Why should human engineering tasks have such considerations? If being super efficient with an abundant resource has a large cost (of some sort), but low efficiency has no business- or environmental- downside, then why be efficient with it?
In your last bit you argue that it's acceptable to send a site that is bigger than even the most bloated HTML/CSS page; I don't think that's true for any site/app that wants to be fast. It slows you down and people notice and stop using your service unless it's required of them.
I think that in general things are not as bad as you make them out to be, and your arguments have some merit but are mostly revealed as nonsense when the rubber hits the road. Universe entropy is completely unrelated to modern software engineering and web sites that have a lot of devs and are not SalesForce are not _that_ bloated.
> but low efficiency has no business- or environmental- downside, then why be efficient with it?
But it has. Data transfer and processing isn't free. It works on electricity. You may think that a difference between 10KB (efficient) and 10MB (current web) is meaningless because resources are abundant, and it let you save couple hours of dev time[0] - but consider that this difference is per user, and you saved a couple hours for yourself by making thousands[1] of people waste three orders of magnitude more electricity that they would if you were a bit more caring.
Like plastic trash and inefficient cars, this stuff adds up.
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[0] - Such savings on larger pages take obviously much more work, but then this time gets amortized over all the use the website has - so the argument still holds.
I don't think people actually waste three orders of magnitude more electricity by loading 10MB vs 10KB - sure, that much more CPU time is used specifically on loading the extra data, but that would be a fraction of what's being used for all the other processing going on, and people don't just flip the power switch as soon as a page load finishes.
> I don't think people actually waste three orders of magnitude more electricity by loading 10MB vs 10KB (...)
Yeah, they actually waste more in this case. The base cost is that of processing of content, which is linear with size (on a category level; parsing JS may have a different constant factor than displaying an image). But in the typical makeup of a website, just how much stuff can be in the 10KB case? Content + some image + a bit of CSS and maybe a JS tracker. In the 10MB case, you have tons of JS code, a lot of which will keep running in the background. This incurs continuous CPU cost.
> and people don't just flip the power switch as soon as a page load finishes
CPUs have power-saving modes, power supplies can vary their power draw too.
Or, for those with whom such abstract terms as "wastefulness" don't resonate, let me put it in other words: if you ever wondered why your laptop and your smartphone drains its battery so quickly, this is why. All the accumulated software bloat, both web and desktop, is why.
I agree with your point, but the GP's has validity too: the infrastructure to get that page to where it is read, does draw power in proportion with the amount of data it's handling.
As far as #1 goes, I'm arguing that plaintext is the ideal to strive towards, not the living practical reality. As far as indexing and access, the Gopher protocol and Teletext are great options to look at.
As previously noted, if you don't find that waste is fundamentally wrong on a moral level, there's no point forward from here. I view myself on a planet of dwindling resources, vanishing biodiversity, and warming at increasing rates.
If you think the energy that goes into computation is free or lacking external environmental downstream effects, then at the root of it, you carelessly shit where you eat and I don't. That's a fundamental disagreement.
Well hold on, I don't disagree that we are on a planet of dwindling resources. It's the method of environmental improvement that will have the greatest positive effect that is the root source of disagreement. That's the crux of the problem - what is the process of solving these problems?
I would argue that arguing over how big our websites are is not the important factor. I submit to you that PC electricity usage is the most relevant quantity we need to discuss when it comes to consumption of bits. I argue that the increased load on the network of sending more bits is negligible compared to the many endusers and their PCs that consume our data.
If we agree that PC electricity consumption is the most important thing to address, then we must ask whether or not the electricity generation process is bad for the environment. Most likely, electricity is generated by hydroelectric dams or coal/combustibles power plants. Suppose we replace those two types of power generation with low-maintenance, 50-year-lifetime solar panels (for which the tech exists). Can you still argue that the increased amount of bits sent over the wire for heavy modern websites is an environmental negative that we should address? I would say, no, at this point we have reduced the environmental impact of most electricity-consuming devices, and we can ignore PCs for the time being.
Therefore it is not the personal computer and the quantity of bits it consumes that should be your focus. It should be electricity generation.
I would like to ask you to consider whether or not your compassion-based arguments contain any resentment. Are you acting and speaking entirely on the grounds of compassion? And if so, how can you be sure that your supposed actions are going to reduce suffering of people and the planet and not have the opposite effect? How can you suggest solutions, like decreasing the weight of websites, and know with a high degree of certainty that it will produce the desired outcome (environmental preservation)? Could it have an unintended consequence?
In all honesty--you're right about there being bigger problems.
But let me put it this way, I still reduce, reuse, and recycle even though I know that one unconscientous suburban family will essentially dwarf my lifelong efforts in a year of their average living.
I know that those efforts are futile for the end goal of environmental conservation. That doesn't mean that I'm going to stop doing them. Being dedicated to acting in accordance with an understanding of first principles is not a bad thing, even if those actions are relatively impotent or ineffectual in and of themselves in the current moment.
As far as changing out power sources to nominally sustainable forms, yes, I would still find issue with people wasting those resources, just as I would find issue with people running air conditioners with the windows open.
As far as compassion and unintended consequences, everyone might be here for a reason and maybe trashing the planet is part of that plan, but equally so I might be here to speak against trashing the planet as a part of said reason and said plan.
It boils down again to if you need to find a reason to justify minimizing unnecessary energy usage, we're not going to see eye to eye and I doubt any argument will sway either of us towards the other's camp. Chalk it up to different contexts.
Gopher- I remember setting up and using that as a part of a intern-like job at my local high-school. Back in the days of trumpet winsock and other relics of the hand-crafted TCP stack. shudders
Mind you- it does deliver text at low bandwidth. :)
Minimalism in communication. I wonder if I can get my SO off facebook and onto Gopher in the interests of the environment... manic laughter fades into the distance
I have given this discussion a good looking over to see if anyone cares for the environment. Glad to find someone that does.
I believe that care for the environment and design that puts being green first is going to have its time in web design. I also believe that along with document structure, accessibility and 'don't make me think' UX that eco-friendliness is going to become a core design principle in a lot of the web. If you put this stuff first then you can have a website that is pretty close to the plaintext ideal. This can be layered on with progressive web app 'no network' functionality and other progressive enhancements, e.g. CSS then JS, with the content working without either of these add-ons.
We all know that you have to minimise your scripts and mash them all into some big ball of goo, we all know that images that are too big aren't going to download quickly. But the focus is on 'site speed' rather than being green. In fact no developer I have ever met has mentioned 'being green' as a reason to cut down on the bloat and existing thinking on 'going green' consists of having wind turbines rather than dinosaur farts powering the data centre. Cutting down the megabytes to go green is kind of crazy talk.
A lot of this thinking is a bit like compacting your rubbish before putting it put for the bin men. Really we would do best to not do the rigmarole of compacting the trash and just having less of it to start with, ideally with more of it re-used or put out for recycling.
We saw what cheap gasoline did to the U.S. auto industry. For decades the big three added on more and more inches to bonnets (hoods) and boots (trunks) with very big V8 engines a standard feature. Until 1973 came along there was no incentive to do otherwise. Who would have thought to have cut down on the fuel consumption?
Outside of America, in the land of the rising sun they did not have a lot of oil. Every gallon they bought had to be bought in U.S. Dollars and so those U.S. Dollars had to be earned first. Europe faced the same problem so economy was of importance in a lot of the world outside America. The four cylinder engines powering cars in Europe and Japan became vastly more efficient than U.S. V8 monster engines. Not only that but cars with a four cylinder engine did not have to weigh many metric tonnes. Nowadays the big three can only really make trucks and truck based SUVs that are protected with the Chicken Tax. Nobody in America is buying U.S. made small cars, U.S. made luxury sedans or even U.S. made 'exotic' sportscars. Economy and 'being green' is not a big deal to U.S. car buyers, nonetheless the lack of having efficiency and economy as a core part of the design ethos has led to a domestic industry that has lost to the innovators in the rest of the world that did put these things central to what they do.
We haven't had 1973 yet and the web pages of today are those hideous Cadillac things with the big fins on them and boots big enough to smuggle extended families across the border with. AMP pages are a bit like those early 'Datsun' efforts that fell short in many ways. But I think that the time of efficient web pages is coming.
The Japanese also developed The Toyota Way with things like Just in Time and a careful keeping tabs on waste. Quality circles also were part of this new world of manufacturing ethos.
The old ways of making stuff didn't really give the results the Japanese were getting but exchange rates, Japanese people willing to work for nothing and other non-sequiturs distracted people from what was going on and how the miracles were achieved. The Germans and the Japanese built great engineering 'platforms' and then got some great styling for the bodywork from the legendary Italian design studios to package it all together. Meanwhile, in the USA there were more fins, more chrome bullets on the grille and more velour in the interiors.
So with the web it isn't just the Lotus 'just add lightness' that is going to be coming along to kill the bloat. It is also ways of working. For a long time the industry has been doing design with lorem ipsum, static PDF mockups and then handing this to some developers with the client expecting not a pixel to differ from the mockups, regardless of whether any of it made any sense. So we have got stuck with the same carousels on the same homepages - the tailfins of the web.
Although it is 'industry standard' to work certain ways, e.g. the big up front design by someone who can't really read, the project manager who can't do HTML, the agile design process that means nobody knows what they are doing, something has to change. Content driven, iterative improvements and much else we forgot from the 'Toyota Way' will ultimately win out with things like being green actually being important.
As for the article, the 'bulls4it web' and David Graeber's ideas as applied to web bloat is an excellent contribution to what web developers should be thinking about.
I think the car analogy is flawed; yes, mid-century US cars were not very economical/efficient, but they sacrificed that for comfort --- big roomy interiors, cushy seats, soft suspensions, automatic transmissions, A/C, etc. The automakers were simply obliging to please customers with these features. There's a reason "econobox" is mostly a pejorative.
On the other hand, bloated slow websites only serve the needs of their authors, while annoying all their users. Users aren't asking for more tracking, ads, or any of that other bullshit.
(Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of vintage "Detroit Iron". You really have to ride in one to understand the experience.)
> On the other hand, bloated slow websites only serve the needs of their authors, while annoying all their users. Users aren't asking for more tracking, ads, or any of that other bullshit.
The bloat actually serves a lot of people, directly or indirectly. It is like packaging, everyone complains about packaging and plastic but when you are in the supermarket do you take that box that is already opened or that tin with the dent?
There are lots of stakeholders behind the bloat. Including the bullshit jobs people of the online world, e.g. the SEO people, the people in marketing and the programmers. In my opinion the cookie-cutter way of churning out websites is being done by a lot of people that are barking up the wrong tree on how to do it with knowledge of modern web technologies rarely gained. Buried in what you see is a bundle of reset scripts, IE6 polyfills and other stuff that nobody dares to touch as it has been there since 2009 and nobody knows what it does, within the company that wrote the CMS or in the agency that adds the 'theme'. It is worrying really with the best people can do is to add layers of ever more complex 'build' tools to mash this cruft into something they don't have to think about.
P.S. There is no way I would be in an econobox if travelling through the American West, give me one of your trucks, SUVs or even a sedan any day. In Europe though, tables are turned, a country lane or a city stranded in a U.S. vehicle would be a special kind of hell.
In response to #2, there is also a reason that photojournalism exists--unless you believe in a world where everyone imagines what important figures and historic events look like based solely on textual descriptions. This is completely ignoring the fact that I, nor most of society, would never attempt to receive the day's news via Morse Code.
Hint: TCP/IP & UTF-8 are fundamentally along the same principles as APRS. So yes, really you are.
As far as photojournalism goes, I can think of thousands of reasons why the predominance of photojournalism has been pernicious to civil society. The strategic use of the identifiable victim effect in atrocity propaganda being the most obvious.
However, with that said, I'm not arguing that visual media is entirely unnecessary, but rather against the idea that every user needs to download a 1680x1050 image when a default 600px width image or even the horror of having the image as an external link would be more than adequate for the overwhelming majority of users, particularly those in rural and developing areas that can't afford to waste their total allotment of monthly mobile data on "What Chance the Rapper’s Purchase of Chicagoist Means".
2. Raw text is the highest value data/information return that can be transmitted over the internet. There's a reason that Morse Code and APRS are still around: they're reliable, appropriate tech, and require little to no middlemen outside of the transceivers themselves.
3. If wantonly (namely, for no enduringly good reason) increasing the amount of entropy in the universe isn't tautologically bad to you, then I really doubt that any argument would sway you to the contrary.
Concerning the relative value of HTML and CSS, yes, you could argue that UX matters in that department, but even the most bloated static HTML/CSS page is going to pale dramatically in comparison to the size of what's considered acceptable throughput today.