All Your Pages Are Belong To Us

Remember back when people realized that the Internet was a valuable way to reach customers and potential customers? You would see all of these television or print ads where they would print the URL of a website, or even radio ads would have somebody read the URL of a website. Oh wait, I guess this is still done a lot. Whatever, a while back this really became unnecessary. Whatever the name of your brand or product, you could just search for it in the search engine of your choice and find the same link that was being advertised. Who wants to try to remember a URL anyways?

Well the days of remembering a URL may be coming back, sort of. Earlier tonight I was watching UNC beat down Villanova. During a TV timeout, there was an ad for a movie. I honestly do not remember the name of the movie. At the end of the commercial, they put up a URL. Only this time the URL was something like http://www.facebook.com/name_of_movie. That's right, if you wanted to know more about this product, you needed to go inside the proverbial walled garden that is Facebook.

Now if you just searched for the name of this movie, would you get the link to the Facebook page? Maybe, but maybe not, or maybe it would depend on the search engine. Of course, if you were already on the Facebook site, and searched there, then you surely would find this page. So what does this mean? Do we need to start remember and typing in URLs? Or do we just need to do all of your search inside Facebook?

Web 3x and Web Lite

Earlier today, I read this interesting article about the growth of web pages. In short, average web page size has tripled in the last five years.

Yes this swell in page size corresponds very nicely with everyone's favorite cliche, Web 2.0. It is obviously not a coincidence. More features and interactivity is going to be mean more initial download, which is the very coarse metric being used here. What may have been four web pages may now be one Ajax-ified one, whose weight is three times as much. More interesting tidbits.

• Average page weight: 310 KB
  
• Average total JS: 68 KB
  
• Average # of external JS files: 7
  
• Average # of unique external JS files: 6 (gotta love duplicates!)
  
• Average total CSS: 15 KB
  
• Average total image pixels: 49,144
  
• Percentage of HTTP requests dedicated to images: 75%
  

That last stat is not really as bad as it seems. Images are (can be) loaded in parallel. There is a limit of connections per domain, however (generally two.) A common trick is if you have to load 20 images all from the same server, trick the browser. Make the first two images from images0.mydomain.com, the next two from images1.mydomain.com, etc. Obviously images0 and images1 point to the same IP address, but you get the gist. The browser will load all of the images in parallel (or close to it.) The one disadvantage is you can lose some browser caching. The browser will think that http://images0.mydomain.com/foo.gif and http://images1.mydomain.com/foo.gif are different images.

The other interesting thing talked about in the article, is that broadband speed has more than kept up with page bloat, err Web 2.0. However, not everybody has broadband, and you are basically suffering now more than ever if you do not. These studies are only talking about home users, what about mobile phones? If you are an iPhone user on EDGE, how do you like 310 KB pages?

It seems likely that we will start seeing "lite" versions of websites in the future. We kind of see this for mobile devices, i.e. m.mydomain.com or mobile.mydomain.com. At some point, will we start directing dial-up users to the lite sites? If you were a dial-up user, how would you feel about that? I'm from the South, so it kind of feels like segregation to me: "equal but separate."