Free Equipment Removal and Russian Santa

Again, if it's not business, it's better to accomodate slow connections.

On 12/31/2015 11:44 AM, Ed Huntress wrote: ...

Trust me, after being limited to dialup until roughly 18 mo ago or so, this is comparatively blazing...

I look at Iggy's pictures occasionally and find them invariably slow to load, I had assumed it was his server but not looked at the size of the images. My ADSL is around 5Mbps so don't find many things a problem but it is getting worse as web designers add more "features", scripting is getting a pain with many sites and the NoScript add on is useful for that . When I did my website most people had dial-up so the first images people see are a sensible size for reasonably quick loading on a dial-up connection then if the viewer wants to see more they can click the image and get a larger version in a new window. I'm sure Iggy could do that easily and automate it.

This is one of the ongoing debates among commercial companies on the Web, and there is a lot to discuss. Suffice to say that most people prefer the "richer" websites, and that 44 US states now have *average* broadband speeds above 10 Mbps download.

A couple of days ago, NYC opened its first two free wifi kiosks, with gigabit wifi, in my son's neighborhood. They're installing 7,500 more. The state of NY is investing $500 million, with another $500 million provided by the private sector, to raise minimum download speeds to

100 Mbps throughout the state by 2019.

Where I live, in NJ, the average is above 15 Mbps. The same is true for the other mid-Atlantic seaboard states, plus Washington and Utah. My service is 60 Mbps; for a few bucks more per month, I could have

100.

That's where most of the customers are. A lot of RCM members live outside of metro areas, but they aren't typical of the majority of US users.

So, again, if you're a business and you're deciding how much of a load to put on your website, you have to consider who your customers are and how much it takes to stand out and keep them coming back. My business -- online publishing -- wrestles with it all the time. A site like Iggy's, which doesn't rely on online interactivity, big videos or

3D PDFs, can be really compact and fast -- except for his big photos. But sites in many visually and technically competitive businesses keep reaching for more.

It is different. Yours is an ice maker. Mine is just a storage bin. No refrigeration equipment.

i

He has good sized pictures. He made his websites a long time ago, like

2008, and his pistures were top resolution for the time.

Here's an example:

view-source:

scroll to the bottom for date embedded in HTML

- - Updated 03/21/2008

What I do in most places, like my project pages, is that I provide thumbnails of decent quality, like 400x400. They link to pictures of very good quality (loosely defined).

My ebay pictures are about 500 kb.

You presented facts that lead an inescapable conclusion, that it is more important to provide details to (most) people, who can afford good connections, rather than accommodate the remaining few who have a slow connection.

Thumbnails, generally, alleviate this dilemma.

This is wrong.

You may not need to see the veins on leaves on the ground, but there may be a model number,m serial number or some such, that you may want to zoom in. How many holes, shape of holes etc, comes up for many pictures and a good picture saves the viewer and publisher a lot of time.

This is nice.

For my project pages, I do use thumbnails.

In this instance, I did not feel that this story deserved a page of its own, and posted a link to the jpeg.

i

Oh, darn. You coulda been rich!

In general, that's true. That is, if you're doing business on the Web and not trying to make it easy for everyone to share it.

Yes, a good policy.

No, it's right. If you've experimented with graphic file formats, you realize that most people GROSSLY underuse JPEG compression. Except with files that are originally photos of black-on-white text on sheets of paper, or converted vector files, you can stomp on those files a lot more with JPEG than most people realize.

You don't need to reduce the pixels. You just reduce, initially, the noise.

Here is an example. I copied one of your photos (2.10 MB), and then compressed it by an additional 72%. Take a look at the two. I snipped out pieces that show type in order to make it easier to see the point. If you can tell the difference, you have better eyes than mine. The "compressed" versions were saved at a setting of "7" (medium) in Photoshop:

No, you have not, in most instances I've seen. Some pages have specified a display size but the entire file has to download to display it at that rez. I don't recall ever seeing a fast-loading page from you in the past several years. Cites, please?

That would be a whole lot better. The file in question this time is exactly FIVE MEGABYTES and sized 5312x2988x16M.

Atta Boy, Old Weird Ed! Serve the rich, f*ck the poor (and all the people who are not serviced by fast Internet by their providers).

When used, yes they do.

We don't publish online magazines for the poor, Old Weird Larry. You may be thinking of _Poor Magazine_. We publish for metalworking companies.

I prefer to get maximum detail -- as I often zoom in to images. Even this one, where it appears that the smoker is missing a calibrated temperature knob.

[ ... ]

How about a smaller image, and a link to download full resolution if desired? That could keep those with the slower downloads happy while satisfying those who prefer resolution like me as well. If I'm going to wait through a full download, I can certainly take the extra time for the smaller image to tell whether I *want* the complete image. FWIW -- my connection is a T1 (slower than some of the cable or FIOS ones, but far faster than dialup. :-)

Or -- without using too much fancy new HTML -- is it possible to test the download speed at the start and offer smaller images if the speed is below some limit? (Ideally, this would work without javascript and other such extensions which are often disabled by the security-conscious. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

[ ... ] [ ... ]

I believe that Iggy uses linux by preference, so neither Photoshop nor IrfanView are available choices. However, "the GIMP" will do it all, and is also free. (And -- he probably uses it already.)

Enjoy, DoN.

In today's world there is no excuse for anyone to make customers or visitors to your site wait for the download of large bloated pictures. Put the compressed photos online, with a link to "high resolution view available - click here" ifyou think someone may want to count the pores on your nose, or the rivets on the golden gate bridge.

What I'm suggesting is that he default to quicker pics, with a link to a full-sized, full-rez pic if people wish one. It's a small snippet of HTML which can be dropped in at will.

Sure. People who do that are called "web designers" and they tell their client how slowly the site loads at different speeds of Internet. Several programs used to do that for you, but it fell from grace.

The last word: Ig wants detail and doesn't care about download speed.

There is a local guy that sells EAS broadcast equipment to AM & FM radio stations. He uses huge image files, then thinks that the 'Constrain' command reduces the size before it is downloaded. I tried for over an hour to convince him to scale the images first. The server was so slow that one image took over 10 minutes to download. The size that it was displayed would have downloaded in about 15 seconds. So, the last time I looked, he still hadn't fixed it, and he was paying a higher fee to the hosting company because of his sloppy programming.

Maybe I'm atypical but I find websites with lots of visual gimmickry off putting as it gets in the way of finding the information I want. Unless I know the information is on the site I will frequently go elsewhere for it and the OTT site gets ignored. One welding supplier site I had to put up with, the catalogue had simulated page turning which probably go the bods in marketing off but was a waste of time while looking at their products IMO.

As I said earlier, this can become a lengthy discussion. The issues here are the same ones that have been characteristic of hypertext since before there was a Web. I was involved with Cognetics' HyperTIES hypertext software for training programs back in the '80s, and the very same issues kept coming up.

There are several reasons and objectives one may have in using any kind of hypertext. You may be searching for something specific. That requires an effective search engine. You may want to browse a product category. That requires moderate search capability combined with excellent navigation. Or you may want to browse and read. That requires good navigation and good reading, whether it's an HTML page, a flip book (the "simulated page turning" that you mentioned), or links to PDFs or other self-contained text/graphic files.

In your case, you wanted effective search and you got a flip book. That's not very thoughtful Web design. A lot of Web designers do a poor job of thinking about how users are going to use it. They put in the geejaws without thinking.

The really hard part is navigation. That has been a problem since the late '60s, when the US Air Force was developing Xanadu for training and maintenance support. The early hypertext implementations, like HyperCard and HyperTIES, focused on that and tried to distinguish themselves by having superior navigation. When hypertext moved to the Web, no navigation standard was developed or carried over, and the quality of navigation is all over the map -- mostly poor. It's mostly a random system of hyperlinks, with little or no way to know how all of the information is organized.

Add to that the fact that most of the better, newer interactive hypertext capabilities require high-speed connections, and the situation is ripe for complaints from anyone who doesn't have at least, say, 10 Mbps download speeds. As we discussed, that's the speed that the majority of people in the US have. "High-speed" is defined as

25 Mbps by most organizations, and that's more or less the cost of admission for businesses that are using the Web these days.

So you're not an atypical user, in the sense that you wanted search and you got flip-book. That's a mistake by the Web developer. But your speeds may be atypically low. Suck it up -- nobody is developing anything for speeds of less than 10 Mbps these days.

On our site

our focus is on browse-and-read, but we have search that will take you to quick-loading HTML articles of article subjects, product names, and so on. We keep working to improve it. Our basic feature is a flip book, which gives you embedded features like self-contained videos and, starting in about a week, interactive 3D Acrobat files. That's appropriate for a magazine but definitely NOT appropriate for a catalog, as you experienced.

I suspect that many of our features are atrocious on slow connections, and maybe unuseable with dial-up. We don't get complaints about it because our readers are mostly from businesses that have high-speed.

Iggy's situation is kind of unique. I can see his point that the high-res photos are important to him. He could save some download time by using more JPEG compression but the thumbnail/big-file combination is good, too.

There's no way around it, though: Unless you have a high-speed Internet connection, you're going to keep growing more frustrated over time, as Web design assumes that you have high speed.