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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Maciej Ceglowski, proprietor of the Pinboard bookmarking site, spoke back on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney, Australia [webdirections.org] about the problem of increasingly bloated web pages. His talk describes the nature of the bloat problem, fake attempts at pretending to fix it, the bloat that advertisements contribute, mishandling of images, unreasonable crufty javascript frameworks, time wasting layouts, sluggish backends, and why it is important to address these issues. The reasons to do so go well beyond just aesthetics and efficiency.

Here's the hortatory part of the talk:

Let’s preserve the web as the hypertext medium it is, the only thing of its kind in the world, and not turn it into another medium for consumption, like we have so many examples of already.

Let’s commit to the idea that as computers get faster, and as networks get faster, the web should also get faster.

Let’s not allow the panicked dinosaurs of online publishing to trample us as they stampede away from the meteor. Instead, let's hide in our holes and watch nature take its beautiful course.

Most importantly, let’s break the back of the online surveillance establishment that threatens not just our livelihood, but our liberty. Not only here in Australia, but in America, Europe, the UK—in every free country where the idea of permanent, total surveillance sounded like bad science fiction even ten years ago.

He closes with an appeal to address these concerns in order to improve general accessibility of the WWW, which correlates with its general awesomeness.

From The Website Obesity Crisis [idlewords.com] (transcript)
The Website Obesity Crisis [webdirections.org] (video)

Original Submission