In all the euphoria for Web 2.0 I am lately traveling in “Modem-country” again. Oh no! Do you remember?! No high speed Internet, connections with 40K or even 33K (thousand) only, where a slow DSL is 768K, normal are 2M (million). Wow. It is relatively easy to use Google and many other websites, but then I stepped into “Web-2.0-content” and got into the World-Wide-Wait…

And I realized how many website developers add into “unclean” code, complex but unnecessary flash animations, large images that have not been optimized to quick loading times. I received mails with 2MB attachments, happy that we use an IMAP-server, so I did not need to download the attachments as in earlier times!

It’s also frustrating if you send me my entire inquiry back, as if I wouldn’t be able to remember what I wrote or look up my mail. If you quote, fine. If not, be so kind and delete the inbound mail. Ctrl-A to mark all, or Ctrl-Shift-End to mark from the cursor to the end. Then hit “delete”…
We became so quickly used to high speed, many just don’t care what the recipient uses to connect. And yes, I got a 20MB file attachment too… Lucky I use a decent software that did not automatically try to download it… Sorry, I will only read it upon return.

Best of all, I do like the Word.doc-attachments, they always look so funny when I open them with Open Office. Some even warn me of activated Macros in the document (which I usually disable) I know why I prefer PDF 😉 And sorry people, I will not click to auto-confirm reception, I find this rather annoying.

So my friends, you better think about all this gadgets you like on websites. Especially when you address an international audience, I may not be the only one who cannot use your site.