Jun/102
Internet Speeds & Page Sizes
One of my uni subject this term is web design. My first assignment is a webpage (link), and you are penalised if your submission is more than 200kb! My site is 299kb.
I appreciate that image optimisation and download times are extremely important, however, a 200kb limit is far too small.
For example:
The facebook front page (logged out) loads 507kb
The Amazon.com homepage loads 877kb.
The Ebay.com.au homepage loads 861kb
The ABC.net.au homepage loads 1.26 MB
The ninemsn.com.au homepage loads 1.458MB (I think this is the default IE homepage?)
THE WEB DESIGN COURSE MOODLE PAGE loads 589kb!
And even the W3C.org homepage is 203kb!
(These stats were taken from the firebug firefox extension)
In 2008, only 14% of Australians had dial up. If we extrapolate this data based on previous years decline, in 2010, only approx. 4.3% of Australians use dial up. (see http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/8153.0Main+Features1Dec%202008?OpenDocument). I would personally believe this to be a generous estimate.
Dial up support is an interesting topic. Do we continue to develop pages that support the minority of the population at the expense of good design and UI? If so, we should stop using Jquery and other JS libraries, as well as any CMS systems which are typically bulky (read: wordpress, joomla), CSS3 fonts and some great things that are happening with HTML5 and SVGs.
As an <aside> (get it? That was my first HTML5 joke), the course also requires that your page supports an 800×600 display – the industry has clearly moved to 1024 minimum support. The disconnection between uni and reality really annoys me!
I’d appreciate thoughts from other developers on this.
June 30th, 2010
Ah yes, the old “reality gap” of university education!! As a teacher I’m going to completely ignore all the points about web stanadards, and look at the fact that this is what you’re being taught and say this:
Knowing that this has been the case for you (and the case for me, and oh, what’s that? The case for EVERY CQU student?!), I think it’s important that we learn from this mistake and make sure we don’t make the same mistake with our students!
June 30th, 2010
This is a fairly widespread phenomenon – when I was studying at NMIT in 2002 they were banging the drum for 800 x 600 then (and websafe colours, too – please tell me they’re not still teaching those, too!). It’s shocking that nearly a decade later they’re still stuck in 1996.