Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

johnchristopher

> One thing we need to understand when building websites optimised for reading is that text is small. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a pretty thick book by most measures, and only clocks in at about 500kb of text. How is it that this review of 1/18th of the book on Medium is 5.4 times the size of the entire book?

I copy-pasted the HTML source for the review in a new file and it's 20kb. So if it was a full review it would be a 360kb file. Uncompressed, unlike epub files. Once compressed it is ~6kb. 6kb*18 = 108kb. I wouldn't read a book review that is 1/5th of the original material or I wouldn't call it a book review but I digress.

Anyway, should we include the e-reader's viewer code to know how much information is used to display the book and compare it to the CMS's code or the code of the full page of the review to compare... what ?

> I copy-pasted the HTML source for the review in a new file and it's 20kb.

I opened it in a browser and hit F12, viewed the network panel and hit refresh... it is 3.41 MB.

You can do this on the web with Web Page Test... here's the result for the page in question: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/220523_AiDc6H_8YW/

That page takes on average 20 seconds to display... and what it loads to show a tiny bit of text is pretty mind-blowing: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/220523_AiDc6H_8YW/1/detai...

It shows 124 requests, and a total weight of 1,588KB sent across the network (some of which is compressed, so I think this is the reason the browser shows more weight)

Here's the code: https://ctxt.io/2/AADgpNP9FA for the review.

Now I do agree with you, Medium uses way too much data around its core content.

Where does the "1/18th of the book" come from?

The medium article has a "(18/52)" in the title, but that rather seems to indicate that the article is number 18 in a series of 52 (weekly book reviews in a year or so).

Totally missed that !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com