Pages for the End of the Line

This page weighs about 14K: 13K of words and code, and six counter digits at the bottom that come to about 1K together. No other pictures. On a dry night at my house it comes up in about five seconds. I timed it.

My name is Harlan Barnes. I'm 40, and I carry a rural mail route for the Postal Service in eastern Montana: 112 miles a day, about 190 boxes, mostly gravel, mostly wheat and cattle, and more sky than you'd believe. I know every dog on the route by name and every washboard stretch by feel.

Our house is the last one at the end of nine miles of old phone line. I have a 56K modem, and on a good night it connects at 26,400. When it rains, it's 21,600 or 19,200, and every so often it drops me in the middle of a page and I start over. The phone company has been out twice and says the line is within spec. I believe them. I've seen the spec.

I like the Web. I like it a lot. I read about tractor parts, the weather, the markets, my brother's family in Spokane and a fellow in Georgia who builds birdhouses. But a lot of the pages I'd like to read were built by people in town with fast lines who have never once had to wait for their own page. So this page is my request, from the end of the line, to anybody building one.

The kitchen timer

I time pages with the white wind-up timer my wife Mary uses for pies. I click a link, start the timer, and stop it when I can read the thing I came for. Mary says I've timed more Web pages than she's timed pies. She's right, and the pies are better.

The arithmetic

A modem connected at 26,400 moves about 3K a second, at the very best. (The 56K on the box is the most it could ever do, on a perfect line, and mine isn't one.) On a rainy night call it 2K a second. That makes the arithmetic simple: add up your page and all its pictures, and divide.

So a 100K page, which is nothing special these days, is over half a minute out here on my best night. Sit and look at a blank screen for thirty-three seconds sometime and see how long it feels. Then think about doing it for every page.

To find out what your page weighs: in Windows, right-click each file (the page and every picture on it) and choose Properties. On a Mac, choose Get Info. Add them up.

What I'm asking for

1. WIDTH and HEIGHT on every picture. Without them, the browser doesn't know how much room to leave for a picture until the picture shows up, so the words wait, or jump around while I'm trying to read them. With them, the words come up first, and I can be reading while the pictures fill in behind. It costs you nothing but typing two numbers.

2. Fewer pictures, and smaller ones. Every picture is another trip down my nine miles of wire. A row of twelve little buttons can weigh more than the whole page they sit on. And an animated GIF is a stack of pictures in one file: a globe that spins through twenty pictures is twenty pictures.

3. Photographs as JPEGs. GIF is for drawings with a few flat colors. JPEG is for photographs, and a photograph saved as a GIF is often several times bigger than the same picture as a JPEG. And make the photo the size you're going to show it. A big picture squeezed down with small WIDTH and HEIGHT numbers looks small on your page, but it still comes down my line full size.

4. No Java applets. When Navigator says "Starting Java" down in the corner, I go make coffee. Out here that isn't a figure of speech. I have finished a cup before a scrolling news ticker got going. Whatever the applet does, you can say it in words.

5. No music. A MIDI file is small next to a photograph, but it's still 20K or 30K I didn't ask for, and then it plays while I'm trying to read about hay prices. If you love the song, put a link to it and say how big it is.

6. No splash page. A splash page is a front door with nothing behind it but another door. It's one more wait before I get anything at all. Put your big logo at the top of your real front page, if you have to have it.

7. Counters and guestbooks from other servers go at the bottom. If your counter or guestbook lives on somebody else's computer, my browser has to go call on that computer too, and if it's slow tonight, everything below it on your page waits. At the bottom, a slow counter only holds up itself.

8. Cut long pages in two. If your trip pictures come to 300K, make three pages of 100K. Or better, a page of small pictures, each one a link to the big one, with the size written underneath, so I can choose which ones are worth the wait.

9. Look at it with the pictures turned off before you call it done. In Netscape 4: Edit, Preferences, Advanced, and uncheck "Automatically load images." In Internet Explorer 5: Tools, Internet Options, the Advanced tab, and under Multimedia uncheck "Show pictures." Plenty of people out here browse that way on purpose. If your page doesn't make sense without the pictures, your ALT text isn't doing its job. (Turn them back on after.)

Report card

These are the kinds of pages I visit, graded by how long they kept me waiting. All timed on dry nights with the kitchen timer. No names. You might recognize yours. If you do, it's not too late.

Somebody who says it better

Patrice Wilder keeps the Web pages for a university library and works the reference desk there, standing behind people while they wait on the Web. Her page, A Visitor's Bill of Rights, covers a lot of this and more, and her checklist prints on one sheet. I keep it by the computer. She has a timing table of her own, and she says a 56K modem is doing well to manage 44 or 48 on a phone line in the country. Out here, I'd take 44 and say thank you.

Why bother

Because everybody wins. A page that comes up quick at the end of my line comes up like lightning in town. The folks in town won't write to thank you, because they won't notice. But I will notice, and so will everybody else on a long line, an old computer or a busy night, and there are more of us than you think.

I built this page by my own rules: one page, no pictures but the counter, and its weight written at the top. It isn't fancy. It's here, though, and you're reading it.

You are visitor number

since February 1999.

Write me from the end of your own line: [email protected]
I check mail on Sundays, when I'm not on the route.
Last updated Sunday, September 19, 1999