3 ms·

Well, television started as a simple signal. Its now way different. And that's ok. Requirements change over time as people realize how useful something may be.

nothis 10y ago
I wanted to reply something snarky about how the web has become exceptionally bloated even compared to other technologies but then I pictured an earliest-era TV broadcaste being shown in a modern TV show in 1080p and it's comparably incomparable. Still, a less snarky reply would be that the benefit of a 1080p image is obvious while the benefit of half a megabyte of javascript (a guess) to display some simple text is dubious at best, even if it could be used to do something otherwise unthinkable. I feel like over the course of 20 years, accessing a website has always felt equally slow/fast. That's kinda weird, since it's not all high-res images and whatnot. Somehow even the text loads slow, even the static, non-cool text. The issue is probably that these things are designed for attention span (which is low but non-zero) so whatever half a second we have available to draw stuff on the screen before people click away, we feel the need to fill with useless junk for the sake of it. I wonder what would happen if a few bigger websites would decide to design their frontpage in a way it loads in an instant on (nearly) every user's browser out there. So people get some contrast against sites that don't. Like, making no-split-second-lag a "feature". I wonder if it could catch on.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  > I feel like over the course of 20 years, accessing a website has always felt equally slow/fast. That's kinda weird, since it's not all high-res images and whatnot You could say this about any kind of modern software. Our laptops, OSs, etc are all way "better" but aren't instant in loading stuff yet. > I wonder what would happen if a few bigger websites would decide to design their frontpage in a way it loads in an instant on (nearly) every user's browser out there. So people get some contrast against sites that don't. Like, making no-split-second-lag a "feature". I wonder if it could catch on. Would be an interesting experiment for sure. Unless it's a progressively rendered, offline-first web app that looks the exact same as before, cynicism and working experience tells me most users would hate it (unless it's a site for programmers!). Plenty of consumers prefer and like the big fancy JS sites even if they take >1 sec to load in their LTE connections. That said, you can make a nice looking site with cool effects and a JS framework and have it work and load fast (we're doing this now at work!). It just takes discipline, knowledge, and team coordination that most programmers don't have because our industry doesn't expect them to (not enough consumers complaining it's slow).
  - userbinator 10y ago
    not enough consumers complaining it's slow Alternatively, not enough consumers knowing that it could be faster. Most people have absolutely no idea about processor speeds or data sizes. When I pointed out to a friend that a 10MB "flashlight" app whose sole purpose is to display a solid colour on the Android's screen was ridiculously large, she did not understand at all. Even showing her some 4 kilobyte demoscene intros which did far more, didn't have much of an effect.
  - tim333 10y ago
    I think websites, laptops etc. remaining approximately as slow is down to human nature rather than the tech. A delay of 1 or 2 seconds doesn't make much difference with something that'll take you a minute to read. That said in the early days like 1997 with dial up I remember pages taking 30 s to 1 min to load and finding something taking like 20 clicks pre Google. Now that was slow. I'd go get a cup of tea or read a book while waiting. I just timed two of my most frequent sites HN takes like 2s, the nyt like 4s. That doesn't really make a significant difference to the experience.
- asimuvPR 10y ago
  I feel that where we are disagreeing on different things. Your point of how Javascript is being implemented these days and how it impacts the performance of websites is true. My point is that the web, like TV when it came out, was very simple. It was a medium meant for one thing. Then as time passed and people wanted to do more with it the medium changed (for the worse in many areas). The web originally was treated as a sort of digital library. These days its an infotainment medium. Meaning that people use it to entertain themselves and get information. But mostly entertainment. I'm glad you did not write anything snarky. There is no need for that here. (Not being sarcastic or passive-aggresive).
  - Nadya 10y ago
    Can I blame marketers? I want to blame marketers. [0] (Speaking of infotainment...) Look at the percentage of TV that has become advertisement. It's nearly 35-45% of the run time for shows. Same with radio - the amount of advertisements on music stations is almost rivaling the amount of music played. A symptom of lowering music license fees for a dying medium I guess? What with being able to play music from your phone/mp3 player in most cars nowadays... I actually miss Geocities websites. Sites ran by Joe and Jill schmoes who just wanted their own little personal space to communicate, blog, share info, etc. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML_ec6XRYQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML_ec6XRYQA
- mikejmoffitt 10y ago
  The interesting thing is how much TV _hasn't_ changed as a format. The resolution has increased, the aspect ratio has changed, but these are simply parameters. Fundamentally, we're still sending signals that get decoded to form a linear stream of data, line by line, with the same blanking and synchronization signals as would drive a CRT monitor. The color encoding and compression is very different, as is the horizontal scan rate (and subsequently the number of lines). As a paradigm, it's not too far off from what we had before. I think the web has taken a much larger step away from its original requirements and implementation details.
- niftich 10y ago
  Actually (and ironically) digital television is markedly unlike the "evolution" web, because the switch in the US from NTSC-M to ATSC has allowed the same 6 MHz-wide channels to be used much more efficiently to fit more data. In analog, we got our familiar NTSC picture with 525 scanlines, out of which 483 were the picture; 30/1001 times a second; displayed on a 4:3 screen we would now call this 480i. Meanwhile, in over-the-air ATSC we have 19.4 Mbps and MPEG-2 to work with, which is enough for 1080i at very generous data rates, or using more compression, enough for additional subchannels at non-HD quality [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subchannel#Technical_considerations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subchannel#Technical_c...

nothis 10y ago

I wanted to reply something snarky about how the web has become exceptionally bloated even compared to other technologies but then I pictured an earliest-era TV broadcaste being shown in a modern TV show in 1080p and it's comparably incomparable. Still, a less snarky reply would be that the benefit of a 1080p image is obvious while the benefit of half a megabyte of javascript (a guess) to display some simple text is dubious at best, even if it could be used to do something otherwise unthinkable. I feel like over the course of 20 years, accessing a website has always felt equally slow/fast. That's kinda weird, since it's not all high-res images and whatnot. Somehow even the text loads slow, even the static, non-cool text. The issue is probably that these things are designed for attention span (which is low but non-zero) so whatever half a second we have available to draw stuff on the screen before people click away, we feel the need to fill with useless junk for the sake of it. I wonder what would happen if a few bigger websites would decide to design their frontpage in a way it loads in an instant on (nearly) every user's browser out there. So people get some contrast against sites that don't. Like, making no-split-second-lag a "feature". I wonder if it could catch on.

sotojuan 10y ago
> I feel like over the course of 20 years, accessing a website has always felt equally slow/fast. That's kinda weird, since it's not all high-res images and whatnot You could say this about any kind of modern software. Our laptops, OSs, etc are all way "better" but aren't instant in loading stuff yet. > I wonder what would happen if a few bigger websites would decide to design their frontpage in a way it loads in an instant on (nearly) every user's browser out there. So people get some contrast against sites that don't. Like, making no-split-second-lag a "feature". I wonder if it could catch on. Would be an interesting experiment for sure. Unless it's a progressively rendered, offline-first web app that looks the exact same as before, cynicism and working experience tells me most users would hate it (unless it's a site for programmers!). Plenty of consumers prefer and like the big fancy JS sites even if they take >1 sec to load in their LTE connections. That said, you can make a nice looking site with cool effects and a JS framework and have it work and load fast (we're doing this now at work!). It just takes discipline, knowledge, and team coordination that most programmers don't have because our industry doesn't expect them to (not enough consumers complaining it's slow).
- userbinator 10y ago
  not enough consumers complaining it's slow Alternatively, not enough consumers knowing that it could be faster. Most people have absolutely no idea about processor speeds or data sizes. When I pointed out to a friend that a 10MB "flashlight" app whose sole purpose is to display a solid colour on the Android's screen was ridiculously large, she did not understand at all. Even showing her some 4 kilobyte demoscene intros which did far more, didn't have much of an effect.
- tim333 10y ago
  I think websites, laptops etc. remaining approximately as slow is down to human nature rather than the tech. A delay of 1 or 2 seconds doesn't make much difference with something that'll take you a minute to read. That said in the early days like 1997 with dial up I remember pages taking 30 s to 1 min to load and finding something taking like 20 clicks pre Google. Now that was slow. I'd go get a cup of tea or read a book while waiting. I just timed two of my most frequent sites HN takes like 2s, the nyt like 4s. That doesn't really make a significant difference to the experience.
asimuvPR 10y ago
I feel that where we are disagreeing on different things. Your point of how Javascript is being implemented these days and how it impacts the performance of websites is true. My point is that the web, like TV when it came out, was very simple. It was a medium meant for one thing. Then as time passed and people wanted to do more with it the medium changed (for the worse in many areas). The web originally was treated as a sort of digital library. These days its an infotainment medium. Meaning that people use it to entertain themselves and get information. But mostly entertainment. I'm glad you did not write anything snarky. There is no need for that here. (Not being sarcastic or passive-aggresive).
- Nadya 10y ago
  Can I blame marketers? I want to blame marketers. [0] (Speaking of infotainment...) Look at the percentage of TV that has become advertisement. It's nearly 35-45% of the run time for shows. Same with radio - the amount of advertisements on music stations is almost rivaling the amount of music played. A symptom of lowering music license fees for a dying medium I guess? What with being able to play music from your phone/mp3 player in most cars nowadays... I actually miss Geocities websites. Sites ran by Joe and Jill schmoes who just wanted their own little personal space to communicate, blog, share info, etc. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML_ec6XRYQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML_ec6XRYQA
mikejmoffitt 10y ago
The interesting thing is how much TV _hasn't_ changed as a format. The resolution has increased, the aspect ratio has changed, but these are simply parameters. Fundamentally, we're still sending signals that get decoded to form a linear stream of data, line by line, with the same blanking and synchronization signals as would drive a CRT monitor. The color encoding and compression is very different, as is the horizontal scan rate (and subsequently the number of lines). As a paradigm, it's not too far off from what we had before. I think the web has taken a much larger step away from its original requirements and implementation details.
niftich 10y ago
Actually (and ironically) digital television is markedly unlike the "evolution" web, because the switch in the US from NTSC-M to ATSC has allowed the same 6 MHz-wide channels to be used much more efficiently to fit more data. In analog, we got our familiar NTSC picture with 525 scanlines, out of which 483 were the picture; 30/1001 times a second; displayed on a 4:3 screen we would now call this 480i. Meanwhile, in over-the-air ATSC we have 19.4 Mbps and MPEG-2 to work with, which is enough for 1080i at very generous data rates, or using more compression, enough for additional subchannels at non-HD quality [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subchannel#Technical_considerations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subchannel#Technical_c...