Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

The better question is, why does every web designer feel the need to bloat the shit out of their site? Try visiting the average blog on a PSP and you really get a good perspective on how much crap you never use gets sucked down the pipe every single time you visit -- all the Weblogs-inc sites are prime examples. Let's do a little experiment. Go to DS's front page, or Engadget, or whatever. Select all the content you care about -- probably, this is just the articles in the middle of the blog. Right-click, view selection source (if you're running Firefox). Copy the source, then paste into Notepad or whatever, and save it. Check the size of that file. Now, see how big the entire page is. I'll do it for you -- Engadget, this morning (a typical morning), generated a 127,104 byte page to display articles totalling 47,554 bytes. That means every time you open a page on Engadget, you're wasting about 63% of your text download time on Categories, Recent Comments, links to other blogs in the network, "breaking news", "featured stories"... and that doesn't even count ads or graphics. At the very least, everybody should provide a "lite" version of their site, regardless of what browser you view it on.