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I think the primary reason for the rise of increasingly heavy sites is that animations and visuals can be used to attract and "hook" your reader. Just as fish
by vancan1ty 11y ago
I think the primary reason for the rise of increasingly heavy sites is that animations and visuals can be used to attract and "hook" your reader.
Just as fish like shiny spoons and minnow lookalikes and monkeys like shiny objects, humans like pretty pictures and flashing visualizations.
Distraction is the same principle that drives the success of TV. It is so damn easy to just sit in front of the screen and grok out, never mind the fact that the signal to noise ratio is often astonishingly low.
Quality thought and challenging content consumption is much harder than simply letting yourself admire shiny visuals. Therefore, simple websites, while they may contain excellent and meaningful content, will often not stimulate the user's interest as much as animated websites with large pictures.
- meesterdude 11y agocss animations can be done in only a couple of lines; so I wouldn't consider them to be the primary drive, or any significant factor, behind bloat.
- whorleater 11y agoBut CSS animations are...rough currently, not standardized, and don't have about a decade worth's of knowledge behind them. I can sure make a element fade in on a webpage with CSS, but there's already a billion ways to do it in JQuery on StackOverflow, so it's a lot more appealing to use Javascript at first.
- vancan1ty 11y agoI did not mention "css animations" in my post. Animations in general are certainly a common cause of website bloat, as they are often effected with a mix of images, javascript, and css which combine to waste bandwidth and cpu cycles. The article lists numerous sites for which animations contribute strongly to large website size. One such site listed in the article is this one: http://pollenlondon.com/ http://pollenlondon.com/ .