Re: [WSG] Site Check: Broadleaf

[Mugur Padurean]

Hello, reality check here.

Quoting the US and Australian available IT infrastructure, as a good reason for building huge web pages, is wrong for at least three reasons:

1. Over 90% percent of the world population do not live there and do not have dial-up access or other types of network access of such quality.
In Romania where I am living dial-up access it's ... frustrating. So it's cable sometimes, ADSL if way too expensive and other means of network access are are inaccessible due to cost or limited area of availability. What about laptops ? Or wireless access? Both are much slower but in wide spread use. Did you know in my country you are charged by the megabyte ? Technology is NOT spread uniformly all over the world, and making your page smaller it's a better, smarter and fair approach than waiting for the world to "catch up" with you guys. I'm surprised you don't care but that's another story.

2.Is technology evenly spread in your countries ( US and Australia)? Is there no place in those countries where Internet access makes you wanna kill that evil designer that put a 4 Mb flash intro on your favourite site ? I bet you all live in big cities, don't you ? Lucky guys ..

3. Australia and U.S are two countries where "going big" with your pages will cost you more, as in bandwidth cost (etc), and in the end will lead to loosing clients. Isn't it ?

Do you know what's the easy way to achieve a pixel perfect design on any browser ? Yes, tables ! Or is it not ?
We here, all  know  that's not really true and we stand for it.  And for usability and ACCESSIBILITY. And accessibility means access for everyone regardless of technology availability or other kinds of disabilities.
I think web standards were meant to raise awareness first and give an impulse to all of us to build a better web. A web for everyone, everywhere !

Otherwise we will end up with a web full of 10 Mb pages with embedded databases, wallpaper backgrounds, tag soup and proprietary technologies ... oh, wait ... we already have that! Damn ...