- Editorial Opinion - March 1998 - Editorial Opinion - March 1998As a result of last month's editorial I received the following comments from a reader in the USA.
Common knowledge is that once the US Department of Justice (DOJ) decides to go after someone on antitrust grounds nothing is going to stop it. It's slow but it's stubborn as a team of mules. Sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad, it occasionally chases the wrong car. DOJ is now making noises about further proceedings and there's a senator threatening to hold hearings.
Circle March 3rd on your calendar: William Gates is to testify before a Senate committee. Seems he checked his datebook and found out that he could make it after all.
Orrin Hatch wants his head on a platter. Were it anyone else, I'd feel some pity. Militant, take-no-prisoners senator from Utah and chair of one of the most important Senate committees. Seems he doesn't like the idea of MS turning the Internet into a MS proprietary worldwide intranet. Wheee!!!
There are also nine states' attorneys general after him right now.
There's hope yet folks.
This month I thought I'd take up the topic of Web Bloat. It's an issue that many surfers and authors seem to be unaware of, judged by some of the websites we see on our travels.
The Internet and in particular the World Wide Web is enjoying rapid expansion. Sadly, the infrastructure to accommodate it is failing to keep up and it is now creaking at the seams, resulting in slow connections and higher than necessary telephone bills for those of us who pay for metered telephone calls.
This problem is exacerbated by unnecessarily bloated webpages.
Some UK service providers are now placing restrictions on outbound bandwidth consumed by their non commercial customers. If you exceed the limit on some sites, you're told either to shut down or go commercial. On other providers, such as the one we're on, you get shut down for a day.
Surely this situation gives us some real cash incentive to do something about all this bloat?
OK, so what is all this 'bloat' that I'm talking about? Well, it boils down to four things:
Many of the so called WYSIWYG editors and 'Document to HTML' convertors create unnecessary markup. That's partly to do with the difference between a desktop publishing approach, which is purely to do with visual appearance, and HTML markup, which is to do with presenting the meaning of the contents in a logical way in a wide variety of browsing situations. In a rather technical sense, the desktop publishing approach is also tolerant of certain practices whilst HTML is not. In the output of such programs you get a mish-mash of HTML, much of it unnecessary, caused by the mutual incompatibility of these two approaches. For example, you get silly things like single spaces being surrounded by full font and appearance markup. Once in a while or so this wouldn't be too bad, but some documents I've seen contain thousand occurrences of this type of thing. Microsoft Frontpage seems to be the principal offender. For this reason, Phundria is marked up completely by hand. As a result, the fifty or so pages and all the graphics fit on just one floppy disk.
Whilst I normally browse the web with image loading switched off, I do see a fair number of images in my travels. I have a couple of useful utilities which allow me to optimise the size of the GIF and JPEG images in our pages. I've got to a stage when I often feel that this or that image is a lot bigger than it ought to be, and nine times out of ten I'm right - a quick check of a suspect image via the optimiser is all that's needed. I was recently made aware of the fact that many of the images promoting Microsoft and Netscape products were far larger than necessary, and when you think that there are many thousands of these things littering webpages worldwide, you begin to see the scale of the problem.
This is a common difficulty. As an author, if you're going to use an image more than once, make sure you always refer to the same URL for the graphic file. This will mean that the server will only send out the image once, as it will be stored in your reader's local cache for when it's needed again. I'm told that Microsoft FrontPage creates separate copies of each image for each page, further exacerbating the problem. Shows how much they care, doesn't it!
Here I'm thinking about unnecessary images and sound clips. These consume bandwidth like the plague.
We're in a similar situation to that which existed in the early days of desktop publishing, when every document had to use every font just because it was there. Now that we've got the ability to add images and sound clips to our pages many authors add them simply because they can. Do you really want the mating call of an African elephant blaring out at you at two o'clock in the morning without warning? No thanks.
There are no embedded sounds in Phundria, although there are a couple of deliberately 'dead' links to 'sounds' in our 'Browser Wars' feature.
There's a tendency these days to think of the web as a visual medium. I myself originally fell into this trap. This impression is widely reinforced by the media, and by marketing and advertising people. They seem to have the weird idea that the web is just like TV and that you're going to see their pages exactly as they intend. The web doesn't work that way. You decide what sites you are going to visit. Nobody is forcing you to go to them - they can't! Many authors want control, or have the impression that they have control over how their pages are 'viewed'. They don't. You, dear readers, have control, or to be more exact, as much control as your browser vendors have given you. You can turn things off! By doing so you can save both bandwidth and money.
I'm just waiting for the day when our Secretary of State for Education is told that a site he's chosen to visit is 'best viewed by Netscrape or Internet Exploder'. As a blind person, I wonder how he'll react. I know what I'd do!
Whether you take this advice or not is entirely up to you. Nobody can force you to. All I can say is that I follow it because I believe it is worthwhile doing so.
Finally, be you reader or author, it's worth keeping this pearl of wisdom beside you as your guide:
"The concept of the web is of universal readership. If you publish a document on the web, it is important that anyone who has access to it can read it and link to it."
Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the web)
If you know of any particularly bloated pages, please be sure to nominate them for an OnlineAward or a Custard Pie.
This month we feature Mega$loth® Offarce '97, our first contribution from 'MacDoodle'. Ever wondered about 'creeping featuritis'? This page has got the lot.
We've also added a few OnlineAwards Nominations. We're also learning a lot about Mega$loth® Fatpage from the Custard Pie awards.
Just as Phundria was being put to bed we had a late nomination as 'Site of the Day'. Rather than hold things up, we've created a separate Stop Press page, where from now on you'll find details of anything we add between our regular update deadlines.
Finally, you may have noticed that we've signed the pledge - the 
to be
precise - we like our malt pop too much to sign the other one. Strictly
speaking, I suppose we break it now and again in some of the pages we use to
demonstrate the silly effects of non-standard markup, but we feel this is
justified. Have a look at Browser Wars
and you'll see what we mean.
supports the 
and the 
campaigns.