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Comment by sigmonsays | Hacker News Reader

i have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. A single png image of a entire web page is definitely under 5.2MB.

Personally, I can't wait for a shift in business practices. Ads have ruined my confidence in privacy. Most sites share your data with over a dozen different ad tracking vendors. I've seen twice that for a specific class of site, ie thechive.com.

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> I have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client.

Please never do that, unless you want your visitors to have the worst accessibility experience.

Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific needs? If companies will gleefully ignore Linux (and BSDs), browsers other than the ones that ship with a major OS, privacy concerns, free speech principles or shipping to remote areas, I can't really expect them to care much for marginalized groups such as people with accessibility issues.

> Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific needs?

How are "people on a smartphone" or "people with bad vision" small sets of users? Also, rendering the whole page in a PNG file takes more work than merely serving the page as is, which is the second reason nobody does it (the first one being "why would someone want such a shitty browsing experience?").

What about something like a PDF?

We already have HTML/CSS; we don’t need a non-responsive format like the PDF.

> at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client

That point is never. Never do that.

Opera mini used to work this way more than a decade ago, it was pretty nifty as it let moderately powerful feature phones access the 'full' (non client JavaScript) web efficiently. Such a thing is no longer needed though; I'd hope a large amount of that 5.2mb is for reusable assets making subsequent requests a few/hundred kilobytes.

Opera Mini is still a thing, mostly in developing countries.

Back in 2000 people used to do this sometimes (but with jpegs). Exports from MS Publisher seemed to the worst culprit. They used image maps for navigation (https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_map.asp).

edit Clearly this is a terrible idea, just to clear up any misattribution of intent.

What is wrong with sending plain HTML?

Do you enjoy clicking links? Selecting text? Any interaction at all?

Let alone scrolling.

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