1996: The Year in Review

Performance

1996 also saw the return to sanity of most people's expectations about the performance of their sites. First-generation sites, even when not looking amateurish visually, were usually tour-de-forces in complexity and bandwidth. While companies tried to out-"do" each other in the screenshots they attached to their PR launch materials (for print in newspapers and magazines), they quickly moved back to square one to design a site even they could tolerate. This had the affect of sending a lot of advertising agency personnel back to TV campaigns (where they belong) in disgust at what little they could do with the medium. Sites that used to have low, medium, and high bandwidth settings are increasingly serving only low and medium and smart sites are serving mostly--or only--low.

It isn't, of course, that there's little that can be done with the medium. It is more a factor that few designers and marketers, until recently, bothered to have appropriate expectations of the medium--to play it for its strengths instead of its weaknesses.

Many of us tried to fool ourselves--and our clients--into believing that cable modems were "just around the corner"--that nirvana lay a short distance away when we could treat the Internet as just another SCSI connection and serve up audio, video, and more. Well, as of today, cable modems are one year late with little hope of meeting our needs anytime soon. Our initial excitement and misplaced expectations have given way to rationality and our sites are both quicker and more interesting as a result of cutting out extraneous visual and other materials. If nothing else serves to remind us that this is still a new medium, let it be the horribly out-of-synch expectations of performance with the reality of a still frail, overloaded, and difficult and costly-to-upgrade network.

Performance-wise, things will get better, but not this year, and probably not next either. The network is being upgraded quickly, but don't expect consumers to have anything more than a 28.8 connection for at least three years-and likely more.


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