averydonovan
Headphoneus Supremus
I've tried viewing Head-Fi a few times on my recently acquired Windows Mobile smartphone and have found a few things that might not only make Head-Fi more mobile-device friendly, but also more friendly to dial-up users.
Probably the biggest annoyance is that long list at the top and bottom of every forum of every single page that is in that forum. I used Mozilla's save page feature to save the first page of the Member's Lounge and found that not only does the page by itself weigh in at 286KB or so, but that the page list takes nearly 188KB by itself. That's 2/3 of the total page size devoted to an inane and useless purpose! That's a lot of extra loading time on dial-up speeds and not only that, but mobile browsers have limited memory and also have to reformat the page and it makes viewing Head-Fi and other forums which stick with the default vBulletin 3 theme a frustrating experience. And having to render that ridiculously-long page list causes the reformatting of forum pages to be messed up to the point where thread titles are compressed into a column a mere 2 characters wide by Opera and that annoying page list literally takes half the entire page length when it is reformatted into a vertical format. Whoever at the makers of vBulletin decided that'd be a bright idea for their default theme needs to be demoted or canned just for this alone considering that vBulletin is used on some of the largest forums on the web.
Another thing is that each HTML page here has the stylesheet embedded in the page itself, not in a separate file. For Head-Fi that means an extra 5KB that could be in a separate, cacheable file gets loaded each time. Embedding stylesheets in HTML is just an outdated practice.
I don't know if I'm the only one who noticed this stuff. Maybe I'm the only one who has tried to use Head-Fi on a mobile device. But I know there are dial-up users here and there are ways to make this place easier on them. Even on 128Kbps DSL at work this place is very slow, I would simply not even come here on 56K dial-up since it wouldn't be worth the long load times. No, I don't use dial-up myself since if I did this place would be too frustrating to browse and I wouldn't be posting this in the first place, but it'd be nice to be able to use this place on dial-up speed connections (my phone's GPRS connection gets about 40Kbps on a good day) and to just be able to browse faster.
Probably the biggest annoyance is that long list at the top and bottom of every forum of every single page that is in that forum. I used Mozilla's save page feature to save the first page of the Member's Lounge and found that not only does the page by itself weigh in at 286KB or so, but that the page list takes nearly 188KB by itself. That's 2/3 of the total page size devoted to an inane and useless purpose! That's a lot of extra loading time on dial-up speeds and not only that, but mobile browsers have limited memory and also have to reformat the page and it makes viewing Head-Fi and other forums which stick with the default vBulletin 3 theme a frustrating experience. And having to render that ridiculously-long page list causes the reformatting of forum pages to be messed up to the point where thread titles are compressed into a column a mere 2 characters wide by Opera and that annoying page list literally takes half the entire page length when it is reformatted into a vertical format. Whoever at the makers of vBulletin decided that'd be a bright idea for their default theme needs to be demoted or canned just for this alone considering that vBulletin is used on some of the largest forums on the web.
Another thing is that each HTML page here has the stylesheet embedded in the page itself, not in a separate file. For Head-Fi that means an extra 5KB that could be in a separate, cacheable file gets loaded each time. Embedding stylesheets in HTML is just an outdated practice.
I don't know if I'm the only one who noticed this stuff. Maybe I'm the only one who has tried to use Head-Fi on a mobile device. But I know there are dial-up users here and there are ways to make this place easier on them. Even on 128Kbps DSL at work this place is very slow, I would simply not even come here on 56K dial-up since it wouldn't be worth the long load times. No, I don't use dial-up myself since if I did this place would be too frustrating to browse and I wouldn't be posting this in the first place, but it'd be nice to be able to use this place on dial-up speed connections (my phone's GPRS connection gets about 40Kbps on a good day) and to just be able to browse faster.
