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This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney. [53 minute video]. Let me start by saying that beautiful websites come in all sizes and page weights. I love big websites packed with images. I love high-resolution video. I love sprawling Javascript experiments or well-designed web apps. This talk isn't about any of those. It's about mostly-text sites that, for unfathomable reasons, are growing bigger with every passing year. While I'll be using examples to keep the talk from getting too abstract, I’m not here to shame anyone, except some companies (Medium) that should know better and are intentionally breaking the web. Here’s an article on GigaOm from 2012 titled "The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat". It warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size. Here's an almost identical article from the same website two years later, called “The Overweight Web". This article warns that average page size is approaching 2 megabytes. If present trends continue, there is the real chance that articles warning about page bloat could exceed 5 megabytes in size by 2020. The problem with picking any particular size as a threshold is that it encourages us to define deviancy down. Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design. I would like to anchor the discussion in something more timeless. To repeat a suggestion I made on Twitter, I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature. This is a generous yardstick. I could have picked French literature, full of slim little books, but I intentionally went with Russian novels and their reputation for ponderousness. In Goncharov's Oblomov, for example, the title character spends the first hundred pages just getting out of bed. That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew. Or consider this 400-word-long Medium article on bloat, which includes the sentence: "Teams that don’t understand who they’re building for, and why, are prone to make bloated products." The Medium team has somehow made this nugget of thought require 1.2 megabytes. Racked by guilt, so rattled by his crime that he even forgets to grab the money, Raskolnikov finds himself pursued in a cat-and-mouse game by a clever prosecutor and finds redemption in the unlikely love of a saintly prostitute. Dostoevski wrote this all by hand, by candlelight, with a goddamned feather. Here's a recent article called "A (Not So) Brief History of Page Bloat. Rehearsing the usual reasons why bloat is bad, it includes the sentence “heavy pages tend to be slow pages, and slow pages mean unhappy users.” That sentence might put you in mind of the famous opening line to Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In fact, it's longer than War and Peace, Tolstoi’s exploration of whether individual men and women can be said to determine the great events of history, or whether we are simply swept along by an irresistible current of historical inevitability. "Leeds Hospital Bosses Apologise After Curry and Crumble On The Same Plate". The javascript alone in "Leeds Hospital Bosses Apologise after Curry and Crumble On The Same Plate" is longer than Remembrance of Things Past. Here is an instructional article on Best Practices for Increasing Online performance that is 3.1 MB long. The article mentions that Google was able to boost user engagement in Google Maps by reducing the page weight from 100KB to 80KB. Remember when Google Maps, the most sophisticated web app of its day, was thirty-five times smaller than a modern news article? Tim Kadlec, for example, is an excellent writer on the topic of performance. His personal site is a model of parsimony. He is full of wisdom on the topic of reducing bloat. But the slides from his recent talk on performance are only available as a 9 megabyte web page, or a 14 megabyte PDF. Let me close with a lovely TechTimes article warning that Google is going to start labeling huge pages with a special ‘slow’ mark in its mobile search interface. The article somehow contrives to be 18 megabytes long, including (in the page view I measured) a 3 megabyte video for K-Y jelly, an "intimate lubricant". It takes a lot of intimate lubricant to surf the unfiltered Web these days. Everyone admits there’s a problem. These pages are bad enough on a laptop (my fan spun for the entire three weeks I was preparing this talk), but they are hell on mobile devices. So publishers are taking action. In May 2015, Facebook introduced ‘Instant Articles’, a special format for news stories designed to appear within the Facebook site, and to load nearly instantly. Facebook made the announcement on a 6.8 megabyte webpage dominated by a giant headshot of some dude. He doesn’t even work for Facebook, he’s just the National Geographic photo editor. Further down the page, you'll find a 41 megabyte video, the only way to find out more about the project. In the video, this editor rhapsodizes about exciting misfeatures of the new instant format like tilt-to-pan images, which means if you don't hold your phone steady, the photos will drift around like a Ken Burns documentary. You know what’s coming next. When I left the internet.org homepage open in Chrome over lunch, I came back to find it had transferred over a quarter gigabyte of data. Surely, you'll say, there's no way the globe in the background of a page about providing universal web access could be a giant video file? But I am here to tell you, oh yes it is. They load a huge movie just so the globe can spin.
