On Fri, 01 Jan 2016 14:17:18 +0000, David Billington
wrote:

On 31/12/15 21:42, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 31 Dec 2015 19:49:12 +0000, David Billington
wrote:

On 31/12/15 17:44, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Thu, 31 Dec 2015 11:41:12 -0600, dpb wrote:

On 12/31/2015 10:45 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
...

FWIW, my 60 Mb Internet connection downloads the largest of those
photos in a little less than two seconds.

...

I guess that's fine for those who have access to such bandwidth; not all
do (no matter what the cost might be).
Again, if it's not business, it's better to accomodate slow
connections.

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.

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. g 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 (www.fsmdirect.com) 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.

--
Ed Huntress