Posted by Mika on 11/27/07 10:11

"andrew" <andrew@ilium.invalid> wrote in message
news:slrnfknnk0.eag.andrew@ilium.invalid...
> On 2007-11-27, Mika <anon@anon.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> The thing is, to load the page fully and see the streetscape is under
>> 300K
>> (not 6MB as someone reported). If someone has trouble downloading 300K
>> via
>> broadband, and it is not down to our servers or page size, then it is
>> down
>> to the route their hops take to get to and from us.
>
> Using the 'Information -- Document Size' of the web developer tool bar
> the following page:
> weighed in at an extraordinary:
> Total 1902 KB (2089 KB uncompressed)

That is misleading. To the initial load point, it is under 300K then it
stops there. However once you start strolling/scrolling, and only then, it
loads additional tiles of the image *on demand*. In other words, if you do
nothing but load the page, it is less than 300K. The toolbar must be
looking at all elements that eventually can be loaded. That is not what
people are testing here - they are reporting the time until the initial
street finishes loading.

> I have read the
> discussion about broadband / traceroute / bandwidth / geographical
> locality but surely if you are publishing on the /internet/ you are
> obligated to serve content that is useful to /all/ possible readers of
> your site?

It would be impossible to be innovative to this degree by doing so. If you
want to show realistic medium size streetscapes, not puny little ones like
those at a competitor site, at some point whether by Flash or JS or AJAX,
you need to load those images of that size into the user's browser. You
can't get them on the screen in that quality by magic. We use highly
compressed JPEGs and load the tiles on demand.

We had three choices really:

A) Do it for UK broadband users, and those with good routes to the UK,
using a good quality image and sound that can recreate the sense of being on
a real street, to blur the divide between the High Street and Super Highway.

B) Do it using low quality images which would load fast for everyone, but
be unimpressive, and just copying a competitor who we noticed after we
devised the idea.

C) Don't do it at all.

If you are saying we are the only UK-oriented website out there, well no.
The USA is even worse. We are forever finding websites that are written as
if there are no other countries in the world.

At least we have written all the text on our site 'region free', i.e. not
obviously prejudiced towards one country or currency - you'll notice that if
you look around. We were very conscious of this.

Another reason we target the UK as because it has the highest broadband
rollout in the world - over 84% of online homes use broadband. We have to
choose 'a market', somewhere, and so it is our home country predominantly.

The rest I'm afraid is down to the luck of the overseas visitors route. We
simply cannot control that *and* provide decent quality images. Flash
cannot get a 50K image across the pond in anything less than 50K. AJAX
can't either. As time goes on and server technology evolves, the situation
will only get better.

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