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- Hacker News
- I'm nostalgic for an old World Wide Web (which never really existed, thanks to GeoCities and such), and wish that we could form a sect of "Puritans," break away from the High Church, and sail away to some top-level domain of our own where we'll consider any outbound links heretical.by mariodiana
- Assuming most of these sites use Javascript, perhaps the size of memory use should also be considered
I use a text-only HTML viewer, no Javascript interpreter. This is either a 2M or 1.3M static binary
The size of the web page does not slow it down much, and I have never managed to crash it in over 15 years of use, unlike a popular browser
I routinely load catenated HTML files much larger than those found on the web. For example, on a severly underpowered computer, loading a 16M stored HTML file into the text-only client's cache takes about 8 seconds
I can lazily write custom commandline HTML filters that are much faster than Python or Javascript to extract and transform any web page into SQL or CSV. These filter are each ~40K static binary
As an experment I sloppily crammed 63 different web page styles into a single filter. The result was a 1.6M static binary
I use this filter every day for command line search
I'm a hobbyist, an "end user", not a developer
- I use an Intel Atom netbook from 2010 as my test system. It has 1 GB of RAM and an in-order x86 processor. CPU Benchmark gives it 120 Mop/s integer and 42 MiB/s for AES. (For comparison, my usual laptop, which is also nearly obsolete with an i5-8350u gives 22,000 Mop/s and 2000 MiB/s respectively.)
The netbook can load Firefox in just a few seconds. And Hacker News loads almost instantly as on a modern machine. (Hit enter and the page is rendered before you can blink.)
The same machine can also play back 720p H.264 video smoothly.
And yet, if I go to Youtube or just about any other modern site, it takes literally a minute to load and render, none of the UI elements are responsive, and the site is unusable for playing videos. Why? I'm not asking for anything the hardware isn't capable of doing.
If my own work isn't snappy on the Atom I consider it a bug. There are a lot of people using smartphones and tablets with processors in the same class.
by retrac - Seems like we can join the club! https://www.firefly-lang.org/ is 218 kB uncompressed.
- > The 512KB limit isn't just minimalism - it forces architectural discipline.
True. I skimmed the biggest sites in that list, and they still are extremely fast. It's not just that size limit that makes the difference, but rather knowing that there is one and therefore forcing oneself to reason and use the right tools without cramming unneeded features.
It would be worth adding some information on the page about the best tools to help the creation of small yet functionally complete and pleasant to look at static sites. A few years ago I'd have said Hugo (https://gohugo.io/), but didn't check for a while and there could be better ones. Also ultra cheap hosting options comparable to Neocities (.org) but located in the EU.
by squarefoot - I get the appeal of the 512KB Club. Most modern websites are bloat, slow and a privacy nightmare. I even get the nerdy thrill of fitting an entire website into a single IP packet, but honestly, this obsession with raw file size is kinda boring. It just encourages people micromanage whitespace, skip images or cut features like accessibility or responsive layouts.
A truly "suckless" website isn't about size. It's one that uses non-intrusive JS, embraces progressive enhancement, prioritizes accessibility, respects visitor's privacy and looks clean and functional on any device or output medium. If it ends up small: great! But that shouldn't be the point.
by scatbot - Building a sub 512KB website is trivial.
Just don't use external trackers, ads, fonts, videos.
Building a sub 512KB website that satisfies all departments of a company of non-trivial size; that is hard.
by unglaublich - The 512KB limit isn't just minimalism - it forces architectural discipline.
I built a Trello alternative (frustrated with limitations: wanted rows and decent performance). Came in at ~55KB gzipped by following patterns, some of which I'm open sourcing as genX (genx.software - releasing this month):
- Server renders complete HTML (not JSON that needs client-side parsing) - JavaScript progressively enhances (doesn't recreate what's in the DOM) - Shared data structures (one index for all items, not one per item) - Use native browser features (DOM is already a data structure - article coming)
Most sites ship megabytes because modern tooling treats size as a rounding error. The 512KB constraint makes you think about what's expensive and get creative. Got rewarded with a perfect Lighthouse score in dev - striving to maintain it through release.
Would love feedback from this community when it's out.