Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

While a nice article that I do agree with, it's not exactly accurate.

90% of website size is media (images, audio, video, etc). Discounting that and saying that a 1MB page is so much bigger than just the text it delivers is silly and doesn't really make a point. Maybe it's unnecessary, maybe not, but that's subjective and most people would rather have images and decent UI.

It's true that ads are another factor, and it's slowly being solved, but ultimately comes down to the wrong incentives across the industry. The more annoying/heavy ads work better and pay more so everyone from advertisers to agencies to publishers will continue to optimize toward them until something changes (which might be adblocking). This isn't a technical problem so much as business and politics.

However, the publishers these days *are pretty short on tech talent and mostly use off-the-shelf CMS systems like wordpress (which are already bad software) and then just layer on their plugins, themes, and ads to create the mess we have today. Again no easy way to solve that without talent either on the pub side or in the platforms themselves. Some progress being made here with things like facebook instant articles and medium.com hosting.

Overall, the web definitely has a cruft problem, but it's not really that bad considering all the various channels of information access, and it's all slowly getting better.

90% of website size is media (images, audio, video, etc).

That's a commonsense assumption that, in my understanding, used to be true. But the article goes to great lengths to point out that it isn't true anymore. Some of the bloated multi-megabyte examples don't include any media at all.

If you look at what the unblocked version pulls in, it’s not just videos and banner ads, but file after file of javascript. Every beacon, tracker and sharing button has its own collection of scripts that it needs to fetch from a third-party server.

The javascript alone in "Leeds Hospital Bosses Apologise after Curry and Crumble On The Same Plate" is longer than Remembrance of Things Past.

That's covered in the next 2 paragraphs...

There are lots of bloated and slow ad networks. It's not that they couldnt make faster tech but that it's not a priority. Same with publishers who don't have enough skills/resources to get it done and would rather focus what little they have on making sure the site and ads work in the first place.

> Maybe it's unnecessary, maybe not, but that's subjective and most people would rather have images and decent UI.

The rise and success of cruft-stripping-as-a-service offerings like Readability, Pocket, Instapaper, etc., seems to indicate that a not-insignificant segment of consumers think that a "decent UI" is _less_ UI.

As far as I can tell the main appeal of most of those is "I'll read this later."

Source on that? I don't know anyone who uses it that way, though it is one of their selling points

That's the only way I've ever used them and there are a bunch of send-to-Kindle services based on them so I feel like I can't be alone here. I'm not sure how you'd go about quantifying this though.

For what it's worth, iOS Safari has a directly available "Reader View" button that bumps you to a cleaned up view immediately with a single tap. The built in "Add to Reading List" is buried behind the share sheet.

It is, but many times, I end up using Pocket or Instagram because the text is presented in a way that is simply unreadable for me, and neither Firefox's Reading Mode nor Clearly (when I use Chrome) help.

I think you mean Instapaper

Those are more for archiving and reading later rather than about the UI.

Otherwise we've had RSS readers and "reader" mode for browsers for a long time but they dont have significant usage.

Those have several attractions. Stripping the cruft from pages is a large part of it.

Simply having a consistent typography, font selection, size, and readable contrast is a huge benefit. Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem.

(And asstasstic browser defaults is another problem: why an absolutely unstyled page cannot be perfectly readable and acceptable is a huge flaw. I blame the browser vendors and W3C for this.)

A tool which manages a large written archive is another hugely useful aspect. Tabs and bookmarking both suck.

Also: best I can tell, Readability seem to have died so far as any visible development or company activity goes. There's been none in years, though the service itself works for now. I'm in the process of moving 2000 articles to Pocket (Instapaper lacks necessary features IMO).

It's worth noting that Pinboard.io itself addresses some of these needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com