Sometimes, a little CSS and JS go a long way to help the users achieve their goals. Spartan websites can be hard to read.
My own website uses more and more JavaScript, but it supports the main content. For example, a glossary bubble for German words, a table of content that highlights the current section, and calculators give you quicker answers.
A few of the websites listed there might be lightweight, but many seem to offer a poor user experience, even for just text on a page.
In my opinion, the best example of a lightweight website is the NHS. Yes, the page is lightweight, but the effort extends to the design and even the text on the page.
Bloat is one thing, and good content design another.
The NHS, and gov.uk, are some of the largest employers of UX/content designers in the UK, and recently it shows. A lot of it is considered the gold standard for content design; extremely clear, well presented information, where the most commonly relevant information is easily identified and straightforward.
Less bloat is, I guess, a side effect of good content design, rather than less bloat being the reason they're good sites.
Of course, it's easier to do good content design when there isn't any commercialism involved. As soon as you have to introduce ads, sponsors, paid-for content and unnecessary padding/pages/waffle in the name of views and clicks, you can say goodbye to good content design and low bloat.
> you can say goodbye to good content design and low bloat
I generally agree, but I make a living from bucking that trend. The few websites that don't become affiliate mouthpieces quickly become household names in their niche.
Yes, a site can be too spare but that's far less prevalent among sites than behemoths that load so slowly. Question is can a site be attractive and yet be "lightweight" in terms of performance and resource usage?
It's educational to use a tool like Lighthouse and point it at supposed "good" or "bad" sites. I've done this a number of times. Amazing (well, maybe not) how poorly most sites score.
To be sure some of the lightweight sites performed pretty well, but in general sites are a long way from optimal. I know how much effort it takes to make sites that are interesting and performant. I've worked hard on my own sites to reach that high level so I know it can be done. As so often is the case it's more a matter of what one decides to leave out rather than including just one more cool thing.
It can be done, and it's not even that hard. It's just text on a page! Add a bit of static caching and Bob's your uncle. You have to go out of your way to turn that into a 2 MB monstrosity, but somehow many websites manage it.
A lightweight website doesn't have to be boring. My current project has a 1920x1080 picture which is only 29KiB with AVIF (and it'll further reduce in size when I crop it for smaller displays, using the picture element with media queries). There was 5,7KiB worth of SVG icons and I turned it into a 2KiB font. Not the best of savings, but still better (although correct sizing and positioning of font icons is somewhat difficult).
You can inline a font as well, just use the data: URI. I do this only for really small font files, such as the icons, and having the above-the-fold CSS in a style tag means the font comes with the HTML request.
Perhaps it's not well-known outside Japan but one (domestically?) famous website used to test slow internet here is the famous actor Abe (surname) Hiroshi's (first name) website: http://abehiroshi.la.coocan.jp/
I have no idea how it compares to the ones on the list here though.
Very interesting website. I would never have imagined a 21st actor to have a webpage that looks like that of a professor from the mid 1990s. Hiroshi Abe is also an excellent actor -- Still Walking and After the Storm (both directed by Hirokazu Koreeda) are two very enjoyable films I've seen.
Not really, it's on github, they can't control that. I guess they could make a static github pages, but a github repo gives hosting and community contribution for free.
If you want to serve a list of lightweight web services, is it too much to ask to do it in a way where the people who might benefit from those services can benefit from the list?
The "best" part is all this bloat doesn't even add any real extra functionality of value. Simply extra bullet points to the resumes of the folk who build all these sites.
This list makes me realize how much I appreciate design. For all the ones I tried I much prefer the "heavy" versions.
It's probably different on a slow connection so it's good the lightweight versions exist, but for me downloading a few MB's is not at all a problem and totally worth it.
I wonder how many Gemini sites are also served as HTTP(s) and could be directly added to a list like this. What's a tech stack like Gemini good for if the contents you host on it aren't broadly accessible using standard tech?
> It doesn't have all the podcasts yet but it is small and very non bloat
That is a weird statement because a podcast is just a URL. However I can't find anywhere on the site to add a URL (other than the Import which I assume is OMPL and would allow arbitrary URLs?)
Yes the OPML import would import all podcasts in the OPML that is not currently in the database. I am going to add support for adding podcasts on the site but in the meanwhile you can add them by using http post to https://api.podd.app/podcasts with an x-www-form-urlencoded array called "urls".
You can have 1 or several urls, they will be added to the repository of podcasts if we don't already track it. :)
My own website uses more and more JavaScript, but it supports the main content. For example, a glossary bubble for German words, a table of content that highlights the current section, and calculators give you quicker answers.
A few of the websites listed there might be lightweight, but many seem to offer a poor user experience, even for just text on a page.
In my opinion, the best example of a lightweight website is the NHS. Yes, the page is lightweight, but the effort extends to the design and even the text on the page.