Now daydream with me: What if you could cut through all the gimmickry, all the Flash animations, all the embedded gadgetry and doodads that don’t add anything to the content - the real content - of a Web page? What if, as an example, you could check your Gmail account without waiting for all the Java to load, redraw, align, composite and snap to? The computer isn’t running slower, it’s just that there’s so much more to be done now. But rather than blame the machine, let’s blame the workload: After all, the hardware hasn’t changed, the job has. I admit it: A 400Mhz Pentium III can’t draw up Web pages in Firefox with the same snap as a Turion 64 X2. Heck, you need a faster computer just to buy a faster computer. You need a faster and stronger machine to handle all the rendering, transfer and configuration - and one of the reasons people always think they need a newer, faster computer is that the old one just can’t handle it any more. One downside of the push to heavy Web pages and high browser workload is that older machines get lost in the fracas. Flash and dash aside, you’re either offering quality information, or you’re riding the coattails of someone who is. Personally, I think it’s lipstick on a pig, but that’s because I’m wise enough to recognize a lack of content for what it is - a lack of content. That trend is snowballing, especially with the noise that surrounds “ Web 2.0” - every page has to be a double dose of Flash and AJAX, sprinkled with a liberal splash of pointless animated gifs and embedded music tracks, pop-up link previews, single-click RSS feeds and a comment form to boot. The Web is inherently graphical, even if the content is still primarily words and text. Text-only browsers are something of an oxymoron, especially nowadays. Some of the text may no longer correspond to the image please let me know if it’s confusing and I’ll re-edit it. As it is however, this post is well over two years old. 6, 2009: I’ve reuploaded a fresh set of images for this post, after the former provider suddenly decided to dump postcard-sized ads on the page.
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