Well, television started as a simple signal. Its now way different. And that's ok. Requirements change over time as people realize how useful something may be.
Still, a less snarky reply would be that the benefit of a 1080p image is obvious while the benefit of half a megabyte of javascript (a guess) to display some simple text is dubious at best, even if it could be used to do something otherwise unthinkable. I feel like over the course of 20 years, accessing a website has always felt equally slow/fast. That's kinda weird, since it's not all high-res images and whatnot. Somehow even the text loads slow, even the static, non-cool text. The issue is probably that these things are designed for attention span (which is low but non-zero) so whatever half a second we have available to draw stuff on the screen before people click away, we feel the need to fill with useless junk for the sake of it.
I wonder what would happen if a few bigger websites would decide to design their frontpage in a way it loads in an instant on (nearly) every user's browser out there. So people get some contrast against sites that don't. Like, making no-split-second-lag a "feature". I wonder if it could catch on.
You could say this about any kind of modern software. Our laptops, OSs, etc are all way "better" but aren't instant in loading stuff yet.
> I wonder what would happen if a few bigger websites would decide to design their frontpage in a way it loads in an instant on (nearly) every user's browser out there. So people get some contrast against sites that don't. Like, making no-split-second-lag a "feature". I wonder if it could catch on.
Would be an interesting experiment for sure. Unless it's a progressively rendered, offline-first web app that looks the exact same as before, cynicism and working experience tells me most users would hate it (unless it's a site for programmers!).
Plenty of consumers prefer and like the big fancy JS sites even if they take >1 sec to load in their LTE connections. That said, you can make a nice looking site with cool effects and a JS framework and have it work and load fast (we're doing this now at work!). It just takes discipline, knowledge, and team coordination that most programmers don't have because our industry doesn't expect them to (not enough consumers complaining it's slow).
Alternatively, not enough consumers knowing that it could be faster.
Most people have absolutely no idea about processor speeds or data sizes. When I pointed out to a friend that a 10MB "flashlight" app whose sole purpose is to display a solid colour on the Android's screen was ridiculously large, she did not understand at all. Even showing her some 4 kilobyte demoscene intros which did far more, didn't have much of an effect.
That said in the early days like 1997 with dial up I remember pages taking 30 s to 1 min to load and finding something taking like 20 clicks pre Google. Now that was slow. I'd go get a cup of tea or read a book while waiting.
I just timed two of my most frequent sites HN takes like 2s, the nyt like 4s. That doesn't really make a significant difference to the experience.
In analog, we got our familiar NTSC picture with 525 scanlines, out of which 483 were the picture; 30/1001 times a second; displayed on a 4:3 screen we would now call this 480i.
Meanwhile, in over-the-air ATSC we have 19.4 Mbps and MPEG-2 to work with, which is enough for 1080i at very generous data rates, or using more compression, enough for additional subchannels at non-HD quality [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subchannel#Technical_c...
I'm glad you did not write anything snarky. There is no need for that here. (Not being sarcastic or passive-aggresive).
Look at the percentage of TV that has become advertisement. It's nearly 35-45% of the run time for shows. Same with radio - the amount of advertisements on music stations is almost rivaling the amount of music played. A symptom of lowering music license fees for a dying medium I guess? What with being able to play music from your phone/mp3 player in most cars nowadays...
I actually miss Geocities websites. Sites ran by Joe and Jill schmoes who just wanted their own little personal space to communicate, blog, share info, etc.
As a paradigm, it's not too far off from what we had before. I think the web has taken a much larger step away from its original requirements and implementation details.