In Praise of the Small Page

There was a stretch of the web, now mostly gone, when a personal page was a small and finished thing. It loaded at once. It held a few hundred words, a list of links to friends, perhaps a photograph that took a moment to paint itself down the screen. You read it, and then you went somewhere else.

What replaced it was not better, only larger. A page today may carry more code than the collected works of an ancient author, most of it spent watching you read.The surveillance is the point, not an accident of growth. A page that sells nothing and counts no visitors has no reason to be heavy. The text itself, the part you came for, is a thin seam in a thick rock of machinery.

I do not think the old way was primitive so much as sufficient. A page that loads instantly, works without scripts, and says one true thing has solved the problem that a page exists to solve. The improvements worth keeping from the years since — that the type can resize for a small screen, that the characters of every language can be written down without ceremonyUnicode did in one table what a century of competing national character sets could not: every script a reader might need, addressable at once. Cf. the old mojibake of a Japanese page opened in the wrong encoding — a problem that simply no longer exists. — are improvements of reach, not of weight. They cost nothing and they ask nothing of the reader.

So this is a small page, and means to stay one.