Video download link | md5sum 1914b859a969a8d0af558949223b434f Small Sites and Gemini Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: The World Wide Web has many millions of Web sites; some of them have remained small (petit) and technically simple, i.e. akin to what Gemini is

The 250kB Club, 512kB Club, and 1MB Club are scarcely known to most people who are online -- those who like the "hoi polloi" simply came to assume Google Chrome (and clones) or Mozilla Firefox are strictly needed to access allegedly "modern" (read: bloated) Web sites. "The Web Is Doom", says the 250kB Club site, presenting instead more modest sites that are easy to load, read, share etc.

"Sites should be applauded for accessibility and simplicity, not for special effects."It was almost exactly 2 years ago that Techrights redid its front page to be just a single file (HTML) and worked on producing daily bulletins of all material as plain text. With the upcoming overhaul and redesign of the Techrights blog we hope to adopt a "Smol Web" style in the most extensive section of the site.

The video above shows the sites in question (250kB Club, 512kB Club, and 1MB) and explains why they matter. Sites should be applauded for accessibility and simplicity, not for special effects. The term "UX" typically alludes to the latter at the expense of the former. It is a buzzword.

It might as well be pointed out that the search engines are in a strong position to reward fast-loading, small Web pages over bloated and slow (JavaScript-infested) ones. However, they seem to be doing the opposite and promoting the poorest technical quality above all else. Maybe that is somehow connected to Google's (the dominant search engine or upstream provider to meta search engines) push for QUIC and HTTP/3, which is built around advertisement auctions run by JavaScript-laden pages prior to rendering the actual content. ⬆