You never really realize how bloated today's web pages are until you browse the world wide web on a mobile browser on a limited data plan.

I was searching on Google for some very simple information today, and loading the first page that came up, I was shocked to find that simply loading the HTML and CSS for that page hit over 1 MB of data. I had turned off images and Flash, so this is pure HTML and CSS. How is it that your HTML and CSS for a web page hits over 1MB? I swear that page may have hit 1.5 MB or even 2 MB if I didn't hit the stop button. And all I was looking for was one sentence on that page. Crazy!

So many other pages I see start to load up over 600 KB for a single page. Sometimes even without images or Flash enabled. I don't know why?

What exactly do people have in their HTML and CSS that warrants over 1 MB of data?

Let's say that the page I loaded was encoded in UTF-8. And let's be overly pessimistic and assume that for the page that I loaded, on average each character required two bytes in the UTF-8 encoding (for English texts, the average is actually closer to one byte, half our assumed size).

Now then, 1 MB of data equals 1 048 576 B. And with our semi-worst case assumption of two bytes per character, that gives us roughly 524 288 characters of text.

Now then assuming that the average word in the English language is five letters long, that means that this 1 MB web page has nearly 100 000 words of content, the rest being CSS and HTML markup.

But clearly the web page did not contain 100 000 words. In fact it was probably closer to 1000 if anything. That means that the remaining 99% of the web page content was actually markup.

Wow! People forget that not everyone has unlimited bandwidth. I remember once I tried to load a page for another friend, this time with images, and the header of site layout alone was something like a 10 MB PNG file.

I mean, it's not that I paid a huge amount of attention to size when I coded up my blog layout, but still. I think my page with images loaded hits around 600 KB. But the majority of that is PNG images. I should probably try to cut down the fat on subsequent iterations of my blog.

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As an addendum, loading that website again this time with images enabled and not hitting the stop button on my phone got the download count up to 3.6 MB before my humble phone complained that it was out of memory and closed the browser. )" alt=")" class="middle" width="15" height="15" />