It's probably the way that our brains work as analysts, but I've never known when best to leave a subject alone. When I first started out in the early 1990's messing about with HTML and creating very basic web pages, I wanted to understand everything: how my typing a URL into a browser generated a request to a server located almost anywhere in the world; how the data got from that server back to my browser; and how the browser turned this data into something visual on my monitor.

Probably the best primer on that subject -- how the internet works the way it does -- is John Naughton's "A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet." Straightforward without being over-basic, it traces the history of the internet from ARPAnet, through NSFnet, to the internet that we are familiar with today. It might be over a decade since it was published, but it's still one I recommend to people interested in internet history.

Predicting the future often involves a good grasp on the past, and in that vein Naughton's recent column "Graphic designers are ruining the web" in the Observer newspaper brought back an old topic of web page weight to the fore. 

He cites a statistic that "[between] 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB." He goes go on to blame this on what he terms "graphic designers" (falling into that trap of conflating graphic design with web design). Naturally this brought on a bit of a backlash, not least from his own publication's tech team.

It's a good time to have this debate.   The real challenge here for digital managers -- performance for the end-user -- is not going away.  I've just written an advisory briefing for our subscribers, "Address Emerging Threats to Website Performance," which reviews some web development trends that are increasingly having a negative effect upon website user experience.

While Naughton cites images as being the baddies, the real performance culprit lies to a great extent with the vast number of remote elements that go together to make up contemporary pages -- such as advertising and analytics calls. The performance of these elements is difficut to predict, yet all go together to produce the final page render time.

Add to that the increasing complexity and dependency placed upon JavaScript and the yawning gap between available broadband and mobile bandwidths, it must make digital professionals yearn for the days when all they did have to worry about in terms of site performance was image optimization!

As I point out in today's release, the key is to carefully balance web architectures with data architectures...