Actually, downloading Less Wrong via email would take longer on a slow connection, since the pages are sent with gzip compression over the web, which makes it a whopping 86% smaller. Put another way, getting it over email would take more than 7 times as long. Of course this may vary some from page to page, but the compression should be pretty consistently excellent when you consider the high redundancy of the HTML for handling comment boxes and so on.
I took a look at Less Wrong from a browsing speed standpoint, and it’s doing pretty damn well. All the static files are cached for 7 days, and if you refresh a page that hasn’t changed and you have it in your browser cache, the server just says “HTTP 302 That page hasn’t changed” instead of sending it all over again. My only quibble is that some of the large JavaScript files, like /static/psrs.js, are not gzipped or minified. But again, they get cached for 7 days, so you only need to download them once a week.
So no, someone who’s got a slow connection should not view LW over email. The web is actually faster.
My assumption was that someone who wanted to read LW by email would be reading smaller chunks—just getting articles one at a time without the comments, not seeing the sidebar pieces unless they were specifically asked for. They’d really want a “recent comments” for specific articles.
Actually, downloading Less Wrong via email would take longer on a slow connection, since the pages are sent with gzip compression over the web, which makes it a whopping 86% smaller. Put another way, getting it over email would take more than 7 times as long. Of course this may vary some from page to page, but the compression should be pretty consistently excellent when you consider the high redundancy of the HTML for handling comment boxes and so on.
I took a look at Less Wrong from a browsing speed standpoint, and it’s doing pretty damn well. All the static files are cached for 7 days, and if you refresh a page that hasn’t changed and you have it in your browser cache, the server just says “HTTP 302 That page hasn’t changed” instead of sending it all over again. My only quibble is that some of the large JavaScript files, like /static/psrs.js, are not gzipped or minified. But again, they get cached for 7 days, so you only need to download them once a week.
So no, someone who’s got a slow connection should not view LW over email. The web is actually faster.
My assumption was that someone who wanted to read LW by email would be reading smaller chunks—just getting articles one at a time without the comments, not seeing the sidebar pieces unless they were specifically asked for. They’d really want a “recent comments” for specific articles.