SPIRE and Moodle are too complex, let’s make them simpler
Why minimalism on the internet matters
By Benjamin Zhou, Collegian Contributor
September 15, 2021
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Web infrastructure has grown too complex, and we need simpler websites. A typical website, like the front page of The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, contains three megabytes of data, or 150 kilobytes without images, scripts and other resources. To put that into perspective a single byte can represent a single ASCII character.
If a word in the English language contains five letters on average, then 150 kilobytes is equivalent to 30,000 words. Three megabytes make a massive 600,000 words! In comparison, War and Peace by Tolstoy is also three megabytes worth of text, a frankly unacceptable amount of bloat for a website.
The main case against this bloat is the accessibility problems it creates. Let’s return to the front page of the Daily Collegian. At the top of the site, right under the header, there is a bar containing all the sections in black. The section title turns red when you hover on it, unfolding into subsections with an aesthetic fade-in. The top left is filled with monochrome icons that redirect to the newspaper’s [...]