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from the things-expand-to-exceed-the-space-provided dept.
A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were readable, as were pages by academics who hadn't updated the styling on their website since 1995. But very few commercial websites were usable (other than Google). When I measured my connection, I found that the bandwidth was roughly comparable to what I got with a 56k modem in the 90s. The latency and packetloss were significantly worse than the average day on dialup: latency varied between 500ms and 1000ms and packetloss varied between 1% and 10%. Those numbers are comparable to what I'd see on dialup on a bad day.
Despite my connection being only a bit worse than it was in the 90s, the vast majority of the web wouldn't load. Why shouldn't the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? It would be one thing if I tried to watch youtube and read pinterest. It's hard to serve videos and images without bandwidth. But my online interests are quite boring from a media standpoint. Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. In fact, I recently tried using w3m (a terminal-based web browser that, by default, doesn't support css, javascript, or even images) for a week and it turns out there are only two websites I regularly visit that don't really work in w3m (twitter and zulip, both fundamentally text based sites, at least as I use them)[1].
More recently, I was reminded of how poorly the web works for people on slow connections when I tried to read a joelonsoftware post while using a flaky mobile connection. The HTML loaded but either one of the five CSS requests or one of the thirteen javascript requests timed out, leaving me with a broken page. Instead of seeing the article, I saw three entire pages of sidebar, menu, and ads before getting to the title because the page required some kind of layout modification to display reasonably. Pages are often designed so that they're hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it's quite common for at least one depedency to fail. After refreshing the page twice, the page loaded as it was supposed to and I was able to read the blog post, a fairly compelling post on eliminating dependencies.
[1] excluding internal Microsoft stuff that's required for work. Many of the sites are IE only and don't even work in edge. I didn't try those sites in w3m but I doubt they'd work! In fact, I doubt that even half of the non-IE specific internal sites would work in w3m.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 17 2019, @12:33AM (8 children)
Yes, I'm well aware of what you were trying to say, but you said it poorly. In the process you showed yourself to be illiterate. Next time, try harder. You and all the rest who piled on. You're welcome.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 17 2019, @12:43AM
Or a non-native English speaker, knowing good enough English to be able to... ummm... stick with the facts.
Which is good enough for me not to try any harder, no need to thank you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 17 2019, @12:18PM (6 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 17 2019, @03:43PM (5 children)
Why? Is c0lo considered beyond reproach around these parts? Please do tell.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 17 2019, @04:03PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 17 2019, @10:51PM (3 children)
I can troll from my single account well enough to my needs, but thank you for considering them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 18 2019, @04:17AM (2 children)
But of course. It *nudge* *nudge* would be rude *wink* *wink* to suggest otherwise, knowwhatImean?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday September 18 2019, @04:47AM (1 child)
(Advise between friends: you try pushing in places I have no buttons in. If unconvinced, count the English language and phrasing mistakes between the two posters)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 18 2019, @12:34PM
Say no more! SAY NO MORE! *nudge nudge* *wink wink* KnowwhatImean?