CHAPTER 5 Robust, Responsible, Responsive Web Design
Universal access is the fundamental underlying truth of the Web.
Building massive, resource-heavy sites means excluding millions of users
in developing countries that only know the Web by way of feature phones
or slightly better — users paying for every kilobyte they consume; users
who already have to keep tabs on which sites they need to avoid day to day
because of the cost of visiting them. Not some nebulous bandwidth cost,
but actual economic cost.
The exclusion of these users has become something of a self-fulfilling
prophecy, with some developers claiming that the lack of traffic from areas
with limited bandwidth makes optimization unnecessary. An unoptimized
site is unlikely to see traffic from areas with limited bandwidth because the
site isn’t optimized.
Late last year, Chris Zacharias set out to reduce the size of YouTube’s
1.2 megabyte player pages, aiming to bring them below 100KB, in a project
he code-named “Feather.” In reducing the player page to 98KB and a mere
12 requests, he actually saw a sharp increase in the page’s average latency.
When this increased latency was plotted geographically, it was revealed
that entire populations were now able to use the service despite their
slower connections. A page that would have previously been too costly to
render — and taken an average of twenty minutes — could now be loaded
in just a few minutes.[...] entire populations of people simply could not use YouTube because it took
too long to see anything. Under Feather, despite it taking over two minutes
to get to the first frame of video, watching a video actually became a real
possibility. Over the week, word of Feather had spread in these areas and our
numbers were completely skewed as a result. Large numbers of people who
were previously unable to use YouTube before were suddenly able to.^4— Chris Zacharias, “Page Weight Matters”, Dec 21, 20124 http://smashed.by/weight