A wit once said WWW stands for world wide wait, a cliché that cuts a little close at my house.
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Pictures of text look great -- the same on anybody's machine -- which disguises their devilry. |
I first face the dial-up -- thirty seconds of watching an animated spark bop between icons. This on a Windows 95 machine, where I've paid big for the option to play FreeCell while I wait. I am, however, fortunate: my modem usually connects on the first try, where busy signals doom so many to repeat dial limbo. So I'm lucky, except that I surf at 14.4 kilobits a second. That's slow: modems sold today work about four times faster. Now, I don't have to surf that slowly. I could go to my office. I could buy a fast modem. Still, I find surfing at low speed illustrative. At 14.4 watching a page load is like paint drying without the fumes.
Anything but plain text is excruciating. A friend suggested I turn off the display of images. I did, and pages load, well, like pony express. Yet I manage the wait -- until I bump up against certain navigation bars.
You've seen them: trim boxes of text, only they aren't text, but bitmapped graphics. Eventually, these look great -- the same on anybody's machine -- which disguises their devilry. Images off, these appear as rectangles with alternate-text labels, usually informative stuff like: "nav bar, load this to move." Which gives me a choice: load the pictures, or retreat.
Surfing requires speed -- forward momentum, a wave hurling us toward shore. One nav-bar dead end and I'm mashing my back button.