HTML weight of Yahoo.com
Tu viens de perdre ta part du monde à venir. - Tant mieux, s'exclama-t-il: le salaire étant supprimé, je puis à présent commencer véritablement à servir.
Martin Buber, Les récits hassidiques
Not everyone has experienced the internet back when bandwidth was scarced and rare. I have personnal memories, back in 1995, when me connected to the web and gopher at 6 A.M. on our 14400 bauds modems to grab something before the americans were to wake up. Not everyone has had a 16 KB computer or a 360 KB floppy disk. Today, I have an 8Mb ADSL broadband connection and tens of GB of storage but still do I have concerns about ecology when it comes to digital information.
What's left of this short history that we have to keep in mind now that computers are so powerful, storage so cheap and bandwidth so wide ?
We may live in a world of plenty but the principles thereafter exposed are important. It's not that there is a risk of regression, of course, but that we have include a bit of soul in our use of the new technologies, have an healthy relation to the way we deal with the medium. Have an overview, think about simple things we do and act wisely in consequence.
We'll start with an example that is more of an absurd joke. Belonging a bit to the old school, I've always handled e-mail through e-mail software, MUAs, and I naively believed that it was the case of most of the users. Recently, going back to school and meeting people from different backgrounds, I could only observe that my fellow students were in fact using WebMails in different flavors and that some were not aware of the concept of a MUA, of the fact that there were software alternatives that could handle natively their messaging.
To WebMail can be defined as the fact of sending and receiving one's e-mail through web sites such as Yahoo, HotMail for the microsoftians, Mail2Web for the smartest, or, in a more generic way, through one's ISP's web site.
If you only think about bandwidth, the amount of data transfered through the network, the idea of WebMail is huge absurdity. Each time you read a message, it is transformed into an HTML page that contains the content of the message, a visual template to make it more user friendly, a navigation interface and, most of the time, advertisement. Do your own calculation but you should consider that for each reading, your are transfering at least 5 times more data than necessary.
When they first appeared, WebMails were designed for people waiting for an important message on a remote foreign network. Then, the paragim shifted from an alternative access provided by ISPs to a service on it's own provided by third parties : You don't have an e-mail address so we'll provide you with one and you'll be forced to gain access to it through our website. You may think of it as a service but you are not such are not such a dummy to believe that it's a pure commercial furnishing. The goal of HotMail, Yahoo and the others is to make you see their ads, simple as that. Nobody's a dupe. Furthermore, if there is a way to send you UCE or to sell your address to spammers, it turns out to be auite evil a deal. When a WebMail pretends to offer you an anti-spam option, it's just a selfish way to be granted control avec the spam you are about to receive, a service of mass deception.
Beyond huge bandwidth benefits (10 or 20 fold) for a regular use, having an e-mail software on your computer offers so many advantages such as ergonomy, customization, archives, security, control. Sending clean messages, without ads, without HTML attachments, personalized headers, it a whole new world of opportunities to make your messaging experience richer and wiser. I won't tell that it's an improvement because if you consider history, WebMail is an afterward regression.
I even know users, with broadband at home and freedom to act, keep on WebMailing on a regular basis. I don't know if it's lazyness or ignorance but it sure is prejudice. WebMails are usually badly conceived and they propagate advertising and HTML attachments that lead, as a matter of consequence to wasting also the bandwidth of people they are in touch with. Nowadays, it is so simple to create a real e-mail account and use POP3 or IMAP.
WebMail are not only a waste of bandwidth for users and the people they communicate with, it's also a incidious way to encourage bad behaviour over the internet. Breach of basic rules in e-mailing are all so common in WebMails because of their poor respect of standard through badly designed interfaces. Top-post, inadequate quoting, ignorance to signatures and separators, ... WebMails are an incentive to newbies to be lazy, non respective and even rude to the people they try to communicate with.
In a ideal world, the WebMail phenomenum should go back to it's roots, temporary remote access on a foreign network. Speaking of my experience, I use WebMail as a last resort and with appropriate cautious context. As I've described elsewhere, having an IMAP server at home seems to be the best solution to keep control over the whole e-mail processing chain. If you don't intend to dive that deep, please use at least a decent e-mail software and not a virus spreading factory like Outlook express. Download a free copy of Mozilla, Thunderbird, Mutt or any MUA that suits your tastes.
If you don't have money, make a virtue of its lack.
Bob Stein
Many things can be done in order to amke the web lighter and faster. In terms of protocols, HTML 4 Strict or XHTML seem to be heading in the right direction.
From strict ecology, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are a very smart move : present information in it's most appropriate way accordingly to the reading abilities of the web client. Remains to be guessed if CSS are used in their full extent. External CSS, good content hierarchy, validated contents and layout, these are small simple thing but, out of the mass effect, it'll improve the web use as a whole more interesting experience.
There is so much to tell about the quality of the HTML code that can be encountered on the web when you think that some are still using tools such as Frontpage or put online pages straight out of Microsoft Word's HTML export. It's such a waste of disk space and bandwidth. It's really a shame because there are so many free tools to lighten the code, simplify it's semantics, offering good content and wiser encoding. I still "handwrite" my pages but I can understand that for simplicity's sake one can use pseudo-WYSIWYG tools such as DreamWeaver (it's an example, not a recomandation) but you have to choose your software wisely and don't hesitate to observe the code they produce. Tools like HTML Tidy still have their justification. I have nothing against CMS but, then again, they tend easily to turn out to be gasworks.
On the browser side, the web client, there are also many things to be done. With a truly smart handling of caches and proxies, we can reduce the amount of data that is transfered. Requesting only HTTP headers systematicly previously to any content download seems sound. The sad thing is that so many web sites, with the excuse that they are providing dynamicly generated content, tend to send uncomplete or false headers. The fashion of PHP/MySQL solutions for sites that don't require such a technological artilery as done so much damage on this topic. Under fallacious pretexts, some tend to use complex databases in cases when simple static pages could do the job and that leads to force clients to download over and over again more data and leave the servers under a much higher charge.
The question of the servers workload is closely linked to thoses we identified about bandwidth. When it seems to be free or when you pay outright flat fee, one tends to have a laxist approach. This are simple small things and flows but they make huge underground rivers.
Why not imagine in the future real Client Side Includes (CSI) ? THe last CSS specs with elements such as p:after { content: "Hello world"; } seem to go in that direction. Properly managed, CSI would reduce bandwidth used and transfer the workload from server to client. One would face his responsabilities and not his pain like when we see how fake dynamical content is programed by some with javascript's document.write. Don't mention frames here either.
RSS technologies are also a rich land of opportunities. Used as a surveillance or notification system, they can avoid serial visits to a web page while waiting for it to be updated. Low data transfer, user benefit, everybody gets a slice of the pie. With RSS protocols integration in more and more softwares, i think we're heading in the right direction. If you have a view on fundemental informational ecology, the perspective of syndication offered by RSS are taking shape as a way to recycle the human produced contents.
With political smenatic swings and diversity of points of view, the focus sometimes slips from ecology to the idea of sustainable development. Thus, have we to consider the internet in emerging and third-world countries, a massive amount of users not as well equiped as we are in the rich occidental societies. The principles laid out here are a reaching friendly hand towards them. Internet and computers live in an hyper-inflation world that seems unstopable but it's just a matter of point of view. One can propose an alternative model that would lead to more stability.
If traditional ADSL has reached it's technical limit at 8Mb, other protocols will emerge before we all switch to optical fiber. On the client side, there is this common sense that Moore's law is about to reach it's breaking point : overconcentration of microprocesseurs creators, delirious approaches of the computer's cooling, inflation of PSUs and their consequences in terms of electrical consomption, ...
Long gone is the idea of the thin-client but don't we see new internet friendly devices in the shape of cellular phones ? This will lead to questions about parameters of the global internet development, because 3G apparels won't long stick to text-based WAP content.
All we have illustrated about the clients is also true about the servers, as if the economic model of the flat fee had contaminated other areas with it's bad principles. The hit cult has done so much harm and we far from shifting from the will to do more to the wish to do better. This is not a pamphlet for forms of taxation others than flat fee, because there are mutualization and ballance of economy and risk that are based upon fair principles. I just mean that living in flat fee world is not the best way to let customers behave as faithful citizens when it comes to consuming. In our becoming world of plenty, we have lost along the way healthy principles and that leads to feeding the daemon of over-consomption and maybe to global congestion whose victims are always the poorest.
HTML weight of Yahoo.com
There was a time when there was this meme that if you grab some information from the internet, you had to give something back in exchange. You are the future of the internet, according to the long tail reconciliation, because you are an hapax, you have unique personal information to share. Sustainable development stands by you, the strategy of your actions and the meaning of your contents. We've forgotten the idea of a global exchange because we think we pay an ISP to get granted access to content, when in fact we are just provided access to a transport facility as a medium. You rent a service that leads you to gain access to a world where you have to do your best to improve it.
When I'll meet my maker, he'll question me.
Johnny Cash, Unearthed