In 2015, Maciej Ceglowski stood up at Web Directions in Sydney and explained that ordinary text pages were becoming absurdly large. The surviving text of The Website Obesity Crisis is still online, and the punchline has aged badly for the Web because the problem did not exactly go away.
Read The Website Obesity Crisis
Ceglowski’s target was not rich web applications, video or sites where large media files actually served a purpose. He was talking about pages that mostly contained text but somehow required megabytes of assets, advertising and JavaScript to display it.
His measuring stick was deliberately ridiculous and therefore memorable: a text-based webpage should not weigh more than a major work of Russian literature.
When an Article Outweighs the Book It Mentions
The talk runs through examples of page bloat with the enthusiasm of somebody discovering increasingly large animals in his kitchen.
A 2012 article warning that the average webpage had passed one megabyte was itself around 1.8 MB. A later article warning about page growth had become about 3 MB. Ceglowski compared individual tweets and short articles with the full digital text of novels such as Crime and Punishment, War and Peace and The Master and Margarita.
The exact page sizes are historical snapshots, but the method remains useful: compare the amount of information a page delivers with the amount of machinery required to deliver it.
He also attacked the industry’s habit of responding to bloated websites with additional layers of technology. Faster formats, special mobile systems and optimization products can help, but they can also avoid the uncomfortable question of why a few paragraphs needed so much infrastructure in the first place.
The Page Demonstrates Its Own Argument
The surviving talk is itself mostly text, headings, links and images where needed. It loads as a straightforward document and remains readable more than a decade later.
That matters for the Ancient Web project because old pages frequently survive precisely because they were not elaborate. Their creators accidentally practiced long-term preservation by using less software.
For modern webmasters, this is not an argument that every site should look like 1996. It is an argument for remembering that every dependency, tracker, framework and asset has to earn its place.
A page can be visually excellent and still be technically restrained. Those ideas were compatible before the industry convinced itself otherwise.
Read the complete 2015 Website Obesity talk
The funniest part is that a decade later, comparing a webpage to War and Peace no longer sounds like satire. It sounds like a benchmark.