back to article The web is DOOM'd: Average page now as big as id's DOS classic

The average web page is now roughly the same size as the full install image for the classic DOS game Doom, apparently. This is according to Ronan Cremin, a lead engineer with Afilias Technologies and dotMobi's representative for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Cremin points to data from the HTTP Archive showing that, at …

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  1. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Big Brother

    Yep

    And most of it useless dreck to track your usage, identity, PC stats and ads. Talk about over engineering.

    1. Fred Flintstone Gold badge

      Re: Yep

      Oh, you may want to check out Google's search page, that seemingly innocent blank and empty page.

      Do a page source view and sit back in horror. If you were to print out the source code behind it*, that page alone is 35 pages of A4 (without any further external resources it pulls in), and a LOT of people have that as their browser home page.

      * No, I didn't. Print to PDF works just as well :).

      1. energystar
        Joke

        Ease one...

        Just pre-code all the add, profiling and tracking helper code on the Browser. Wait! What? They're doing already? In the OS? Hardware also?

    2. MyffyW Silver badge

      Re: Yep

      And Frontier:Elite 2 modelled the whole galaxy on a 1.44MB floppy

      1. Fibbles

        Re: Yep

        Search for kkrieger, it's a full FPS game in 96KB. Sadly the original download page appears to be gone so I can't link it.

      2. Andrew Richards

        Re: Yep

        Well the original BBC Elite fit in 32k (or nearer 20k given 10k was screen and then less than that as a few pages of 256 bytes were system related). Did help that galaxies were randomly generated from a fixed seed.

    3. MyffyW Silver badge

      Re: Yep

      And Frontier:Elite 2 modelled the whole galaxy on a 1.44MB floppy.

      1. Stu J

        Re: Yep

        Seem to remember it fit on a single 880KB floppy on the Amiga...

        1. WraithCadmus
          Alien

          Re: Yep

          Seem to remember it fit on a single 880KB floppy on the Amiga...

          Can confirm, just archived the disk this Sunday.

          Icon: Thargoids (not actually present except at some military outposts)

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Facepalm

      Re: Yep

      You mean like this dpmsrv.com, regmedia.com, adnxs.com, googleservices.com, admedo.com, googlesyndication.com, googletagservices.com:http://i.imgur.com/sdwzez4.png

      The news services are the worst, downloading a huge image and a bunch of scripts at the top of the page each and every time, all just to read a one paragraph article. And don't get me going on those one inch talking flash ads that you can't disable.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Yep

        Might I recommend firebug, and simply deleting the offending markup from your rendered DOM.

        I find it surprisingly cathartic ;)

  2. David 132 Silver badge
    Coat

    And...

    I learned something today.

    If you type IDSPISPOPD while viewing the front page of the Register...

    ...it does absolutely nothing.

    Maybe I don't have enough base memory?

    1. heyrick Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: And...

      I tried Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A and that didn't do anything either.

      1. Captain DaFt

        Re: And...

        Nah, nah, to get god mode on the web you need script monkey and a good ad blocker.

    2. intrigid

      Re: And...

      That code only works on the classic The Register, not the 2.0 version I'm afraid.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: And...

        no no no no.... you need an Action Replay for the POKEs!

        1. Crisp

          Re: Action Replay? You had it good!

          Back when I had a ZX Spectrum I had to resort to writing my own bootloader just to poke in cheats!

          1. ThomH

            Re: Action Replay? You had it good! @Crisp

            Maybe a Multiface would have been an easier option?

  3. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    Vulture weight

    400KB with an aggressive ad blocker. Over 2MB and a 10 second load time otherwise

    1. Adam 1

      Re: Vulture weight

      Just imagine though how much DevOps you're missing though.

      1. chivo243 Silver badge

        Re: Vulture weight

        Maybe the DevOps need to converge in an SDN hyper type manner to solve this?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Missing DevOps

        Not really. There are some ads for DevOps crap but most are badly disguised as articles. Sometimes I even wonder if they will be randomly inserted into

        DEVOPS ARE GREAT.

        YOU WILL GET INTO DEVOPS.

        ATTEND OUR EVENTS.

        comments.

        1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

          Re: Missing DevOps

          The wife told me once of a particular publication of a book, in Germany, that garnered some criticism as, around a third of the way through, our heroes sat down for a delicious meal of branded, canned soup.

          The book was Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett.

          With that in mind, I'd say that the practice of inserting adverts into unrelated text at arbitrary points has a worrying weight of precedent.

          1. David 132 Silver badge
            Happy

            Re: Missing DevOps

            Oh come now, Pratchett was notorious for inserting adverts and product placement into his books. From Spoonfetcher's Leeches ("The Little Suckers") to CMOT Dibbler's pies and sausage-inna-bun. Naked and shameless commercialism.

            1. TonyJ

              Re: Missing DevOps

              "...From Spoonfetcher's Leeches ("The Little Suckers") to CMOT Dibbler's pies and sausage-inna-bun. Naked and shameless commercialism..."

              Not to mention CMOT Dibbler's "things onnastick" e.g. Sausageonnastick.

          2. brotherelf

            Re: Missing DevOps

            Hahahaha, yes, I remember those. Rumor was the ad writer got the two preceding pages or something like that. (The one that stuck with me was a mil sci-fi novel which detoured into "The general is worrying about his supply lines. Oh, don't we have it easy, we can just go into the kitchen an open a delicous cup of $BRAND".) Go back another decade, they advertised council bonds.

            I have no idea what rate of return of investment you expect when you need to hand-tailor the ad for every book. (Or they had lots of interns they needed to keep busy.)

    2. energystar
      Mushroom

      Re: Vulture weight

      400 Kvulptures could cause irreparable damage to the Country Infrastructure.

  4. ZSn

    Mobile

    If you read the m.theregister.co.uk site it's even smaller and quicker

    1. Doctor_Wibble
      Trollface

      Re: Mobile

      Of course it's quicker, you have 'm' instead of 'www' so it weighs a lot less and with the same amount of electrons to push it through the tubes, it can go that much faster..

      Specifically, going from three 'double u's to one single 'm' is a huge saving of five letter equivalents out of six to its bare minimum, a highly efficient rewriting technique, second only to the transformation of 'floccinaucinihilipilification' to 'WTF?'.

      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Boffin

        Re: Mobile

        And of course, the electrons escape out of the bottom legs of the 'm' much faster, whereas they're trapped in the 'w's until enough of them amass and they can climb out. Which slows down the page loading even more, as any fule kno.

        Unless you're in Australia, where the opposite applies. Trust me, I have MCSE certification and DevOps qualifications and know about these things.

        1. Captain DaFt

          Re: Mobile

          " I have MCSE certification and DevOps qualifications and know about these things."

          I once suffered severe head trauma and developed DevOps qualifications, but fortunately, I recovered fully.

          Otherwise, I might have been MCSE certified.

          (Eh, sorry, that just popped into my head... maybe suffering a relapse?)

        2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: Mobile

          And of course, the electrons escape out of the bottom legs of the 'm' much faster, whereas they're trapped in the 'w's until enough of them amass and they can climb out.

          You don't need to switch to 'm' to fix this; quantum annealing will do the trick. Just turn up the color temperature on your monitor and the electrons will tunnel through the sides of the 'w's. That's how the DWave machine works.

          The rest of your comment is spot-on, though.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Mobile

        "Of course it's quicker, you have 'm' instead of 'www' so it weighs a lot less and with the same amount of electrons to push it through the tubes, it can go that much faster.."

        Obligatory Dilbert http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-08-20

      3. RegGuy1 Silver badge

        from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

        If w is double u, why is m not double n?

        1. Adam 1

          Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

          Because Dublin is a city.

          /I'll grab my coat.

          1. TonyJ

            Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

            "...Because Dublin is a city.

            /I'll grab my coat..."

            I'll see your city and raise you a preisident... "dubble-yer".

            <edit> I am not actually sure what a "presidtent" is. Some kind of camping accessory? Edited for my dire spelling.

            1. bigphil9009

              Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

              Err, you might need to edit that again ;-)

              I have checked and triple chequed my posting to insure that there are know typos in my response, I think I'm cleer.

              1. TonyJ

                Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

                I give up trying to type posts on my mobile. I just can't do it. Either I mess the word up or the autocorrect has a really good go. :(

        2. Charles 9

          Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

          Technically, W should be double V (and in some languages like Spanish they DO say that--as in "doble ve") As for why not double n, probably because M comes BEFORE N in the alphabet AND a capital M looks nothing like two capital N's side by side unlike with W which DOES look like 2 V's.

          PS. Why DOES English say double U instead of double V? Is it because of cursive script where it IS a double U?

          1. captain veg Silver badge

            Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

            In Spanish, doble v is pronounced like v. In English, double u is more like "ooh" -- compare French OUI and English WE.

            -A.

          2. harmjschoonhoven
            Headmaster

            Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

            @Charles 9

            In the 6th century AD the Roman script started to be used to write the version of English spoken at the time. But Latin does not have the W-sound. So that was written an VV, where V is the way the romans chiseled their U-sound.

            (The compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, lemma W)

            1. Captain Badmouth
              Headmaster

              Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

              "V is the way the romans chiseled their U-sound"

              Some older buildings will have V instead of U in their spelling - "PVBLIC LIBRARY" for instance.

              We have one locally.

              1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

                Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

                We still have one locally.

                FTFY: the govt has advisers who thing that Amazon is good replacement for local libraries…

              2. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

                "Some older buildings will have V instead of U in their spelling - "PVBLIC LIBRARY" for instance."

                Not to mention some Glaswegian synthpop indietronica bands too.

                .

          3. Steve Graham

            Re: from three 'double u's to one single 'm'

            In Italian, "www" is pronounced "voovoovoo", which is much quicker than "doubleyoudoubleyoudoubleyou". However, they say "punto" not "dot", which restores the balance slightly.

            (The ".it" at the end is "poonto eet".)

  5. Teiwaz

    'You need a plugin to display this content'

    Has no one devised an HTML5 Doom yet?

    1. JasonT

      Re: 'You need a plugin to display this content'

      Old news... they are already on to Quake 3:

      https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62064441/ioquake3.js/ioquake3.html

  6. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    "The HTTP Archive report places the average web page at around 2,301KB. Most of the page bloat is due to images, which take up on average 1,463KB of data. Next is script code, which occupies 360KB, followed by video, averaging 200KB per page on average."

    That leaves about 300K for text and ... not sure. Even with markup, 300K of text is a lot. Are people pulling in 290K of CSS for every page?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Probably JavaScript and poor image optimisation… assuming the "page" includes the embedded content such as images and scripts.

    2. Primus Secundus Tertius

      @Ken H

      I save, for personal use, the occasional worthwhile web wisdom (aka www) and then edit it to clean text.

      The average el Reg piece is 2K to 3K bytes, but up to 10K for extended articles. Other publications are 5K to 15K bytes.

      So most of our bandwidth goes on pictures and video, which add little to the occasional well written piece; and mostly to adverts which add nothing.

      I resent the way adverts dominate the byte count, with their feeble excuse that they are paying the bills.

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