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Comment by calineczka | Hacker News Reader

It would kind-of-make sense but only for static pages. Pages are now an interactive applications so comparing them to size of visual representation of their initial state is not a best metric.

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Almost all pages I regularly visit are not interactive applications. HN is one of the most interactive sites.

News websites in particular are guilty of downloading Megabytes upon Megabytes of who knows what to display the five paragraphs of text and the image that I actually want to see.

A lot of developers like to think that the websites they're building are interactive applications where people spent a lot of time strolling around. In almost all cases I get to such "applications" through direct deep links, and i'll close the tab when done looking at that specific page. I rarely care about anything else but the initial state.

Same experience when I was working for a news site. An increasing amount of users get to articles directly from e.G. facebook and close the site after reading.

I personally try to avoid interactive pages. Most of them seem to be built by people who hire psychologists with the goal of preventing you from doing other things.

If by interactive you mean "reactive html5" pages, then I have to admit that I avoid them like the plague.

They require endless scrolling, there are often pointless template images on them and the fonts are too big, and their maintainers often want you to try out or download something 'for free' - and three days later you find out it's not free at all and they want $5/mo.

Sure, there are exceptions. I couldn't imagine google maps without bloat. That is a web-application. But it is an exception. The current problem is that we treat exceptions like they are the norm. Most sites to not need tons of JS/css/etc to display a 10-paragraph news article, yet they do because "reasons".

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