[bebna]

The best thing about old site designs is for me their small footprint. The whole payload of viaweb is 62.5kb, a nice size for fitting in the 64kbps of ISDN.

Why do I think this is relevant today? In many countries like Germany for example it is common to have a mobile traffic upper limit around between 200mb and 512mb per month. After that you only get GPRS. Use your smartphone for a week with only 2G (53.6kbps), to get a feeling what many smartphone users here think about it: "It is better to have a Wifi ap in reach."

[Yaggo]

The irony is that nowadays we have better tools than ever to build small footprint sites, thanks to HTML5 & CSS3. We have versatile native HTML controls supporting styling; CSS gives us gradients, box-shadows, rounded borders, etc, eliminating the need for bitmaps. Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.

[untog]

Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story.

Because it isn't as important. If there were all the time in the world, we'd all be able to make our web sites as small as possible, but in reality, it's just not necessary. Yes, there are minorities of users that need it, and depending on what market you're in it could be important. But for most people it isn't.

[gdubs]

It's actually important in two major ways. First, conversion rates have been known to increase in correlation with site speed [1]. Second, mobile devices are often on terrible connections.

1: http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-load...

[rhizome]

I believe it has something to do with importing the 20 analytics dependencies required to appear SRS BSNS.

[mayank]

Hate to be pedantic, but "kbps" is actually kiloBITS per second, and including packet headers, it would take closer to 10 seconds on an ISDN line.