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Comment by GavinAnderegg | Hacker News Reader

14kB is a stretch goal, though trying to stick to the first 10 packets is a cool idea. A project I like that focuses on page size is 512kb.club [1] which is like a golf score for your site’s page size. My site [2] came in just over 71k when I measured before getting added (for all assets). This project also introduced me to Cloudflare Radar [3] which includes a great tool for site analysis/page sizing, but is mainly a general dashboard for the internet.

[1] https://512kb.club/

[2] https://anderegg.ca/

[3] https://radar.cloudflare.com/

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A question as a non user:

What are you doing with the extra 500kB for me, the user?

> 90% of the time in interested in text. Most of the reminder vector graphics would suffice.

14 kB is a lot of text and graphics for a page. What is the other 500 for?

If you want a fancy syntax highlighter for code blocks with multiple languages on your website, that is alone about that size. E.g. regex rules and the regex engine.

As an end user I want a website that does the highlighting once on the back end.

Text, yes. Graphics? SVGs are not as small as people think especially if they're any more complex than basic shapes, and there are plenty of things that simply cannot be represented as vector graphics anyway.

It's fair to prefer text-only pages, but the "and graphics" is quite unrealistic in my opinion.

By vector graphics I meant primitive graphics.

Outside of youtube and... twitter? I really don't need fancy stuff. HN is literally the web ideal for me, and Id think most users if given an option.

No, you think wrong. Most users like fancier stuff than HN, including me.

How much is gained by using SVG (as opposed to a raster graphics format) varies a lot depending on the content. For some files (even with complex shape paths depending on a couple details) it can be an enormous gain, and for some files it can indeed be disappointing.

That being said, while raw SVG suffers in that respect from the verbosity of the format (being XML-based and designed so as to be humanly readable and editable as text), it would be unfair to compare, for the purpose of HTTP transmission, the size of the raster format image (heavily compressed) with the size of the SVG file (uncompressed) as one would if it were for desktop use. SVG tends to lend itself very well to compressed transmission, even with high-performance compression algorithms like brotli (which is supported by all relevant browsers and lots of HTTP servers), and you can use pre-compressed files (e.g. for nginx with the module ngx_brotli) so that the server doesn't have to handle compression ad hoc.

I use it for fonts. My website [0] consists of about 15kB of compressed HTML + CSS and 200kB of fonts.

[0] https://wyczawski.dev/

Why do I care about fonts? Honestly, if my browser had an option not to load fonts and use my default to save load time I ld choose that 19 out 20 times.

Firefox does have that option. The main annoying thing you'll encounter is that some websites use custom fonts for symbols.

> 15kB of compressed HTML + CSS

Could be less than 14 if classes were not duplicating css.

512kb is pretty achievable for personal websites. My next target is to stay within 99kb (100kb as the ceiling). Should be pretty trivial on a few weekends. My website is in the Orange on 512kb.

Second this. I also find 512kb as a more realistic benchmark and use it for my website.

The modern web has crossed the rubicon long time ago for 14kb websites.

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