Why your internet experience is slow

This HTML page contains the first chunk of a piece of journalism by Patrick Smith; the actual body copy runs to approximately 950 words of text. The average word in English is 5.5 characters long; add 1 character for punctuation or whitespace and we would reasonably expect this file to be on the close order of 6.5Kb in size.

(Patrick, if you're reading this, I am not picking on you; I just decided to do some digging when I got annoyed by how long my browser was taking to load your words.)

In actual fact, the web page my browser was downloading turned out to be 68.4Kb in size. The bulk of the extra content consists of HTML tags and links. It's difficult to say how much cruft there is — much of it is Javascript, and I used a non-Javascript web browser for some of this analysis — but a naive dump of the content reveals 128 URLs.

So, we now have an order of magnitude bloat, courtesy of the salon.com content management system adding in links and other cruft. But that's just the text, and as we all know, no web page is complete without an animated GIF image. So how big is this article, really?

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