This is great, and ironically it’s sitting next to another HN article where, in the comments, someone is actually defending a NYT news article that weighs in at 6MB.
In a time when most software is filled with superfluous waste and endless layers of abstraction and libraries, it’s nice to see that the art of writing minimal software is not completely lost.
So page bloat is a real issue, not just "old man rants about good old days". A shame really because the rest of the page is pretty light wieght, 5.2kb for the content and 2.2 for the css.
Even worse is that the static preview of the monster gif is the second largest element.
I used to have 250MB free with my internet contract until the ISP silently upgraded it to 500MB recently (must have been the past year or so, not sure when).
If you use it only occasionally to read a few articles, you can do fine with only a few megabytes. Heck, I'd almost say kilobytes if bloat wasn't so common. Anyway, that's until shit like this comes along. If you were truly trying to watch a video---sure, that uses a lot of that tiny data bundle in one go, but a gif that should have been a video truly leaves you wondering why was this necessary?!
You just made me think of a GIF-to-mp4 conversion service that runs as a proxy.
Sadly, because of the "HTTPS everywhere!!!11" thing, such a service would not be viable (it would need to rewrite the <img> to a <video> in order to work, of course).
Opera were offering something like this for a while. With the support of a browser and HTTP proxying it's not a problem, the SSL terminates at the proxy and is re-encrypted under the proxy's SSL.
Many web services will take an uploaded gif and turn it to webm before showing it, e.g. Twitter.
For sure, although as a counterpoint I’ve also seen programmers do the reverse. Spending a lot of effort building bad abstractions to completely minimize code reuse/size, when really we would have been better off with slightly longer code that was clearer and that meshed better with our problem domain.
In a time when most software is filled with superfluous waste and endless layers of abstraction and libraries, it’s nice to see that the art of writing minimal software is not completely lost.