I love everything about this talk.

To channel a famous motivational speaker, I could go out there tonight, with the materials you’ve got, and rewrite the sites I showed you at the start of this talk to make them load in under a second. In two hours.

Can you? Can you?

Of course you can! It’s not hard! We knew how to make small websites in 2002. It’s not like the secret has been lost to history, like Greek fire or Damascus steel.

Many web pages now load more slowly than their equivalents did over dial-up in 1997, especially if you include ads.

Part of it is death by framework. Part of it is following fads. The rest of it I can’t really explain.

The web was a lot better when JavaScript was a nice-to-have and not required, and where every site didn’t insist on downloading megabytes of (to me) worthless JavaScript on each load.