I came across an article I wrote in 1999 for The Guardian entitled Cut you modem's flying time which mentions that at the time the HTML of The Guardian's home page was 18kB. Today the home page is more like 250kB.
I was curious about the growth pattern so using the Internet Archive I downloaded the home page of The Guardian for every year available from 1996 to 2011 (plus the current page) and compared the sizes of the HTML of the front page. Here's the raw data:
This excludes anything other than the raw HTML of / on The Guardian. Clearly, it's grown a lot, but curious about the pattern I decided to see what curve would fit by using Wolfram Alpha. Linear, quadratic and cubic fits were all about an R^2 of 0.90. But an exponential fitted with R^2 of 0.97.
I was curious about the growth pattern so using the Internet Archive I downloaded the home page of The Guardian for every year available from 1996 to 2011 (plus the current page) and compared the sizes of the HTML of the front page. Here's the raw data:
Year Bytes ---- ----- 1996 5381 1997 11140 1998 10435 1999 39013 2000 97746 2001 70933 2002 92995 2003 81833 2004 92637 2005 92078 2006 108445 2007 118300 2008 186670 2009 184271 2010 181221 2011 192592 2012 253748
This excludes anything other than the raw HTML of / on The Guardian. Clearly, it's grown a lot, but curious about the pattern I decided to see what curve would fit by using Wolfram Alpha. Linear, quadratic and cubic fits were all about an R^2 of 0.90. But an exponential fitted with R^2 of 0.97.
The exponential that generates that curve is 28985.6 * (1.134292^x) (x being the year counting 1996 as 0). For comparison, Moore's Law is n * 1.414213^x (doubling every two years; I don't have an estimate for n).
For that exponential doubling takes a bit more than 5 years.
I wonder if there's a 'Moore's Law' for web sites. Are we seeing exponential growth in the HTML used? And what happens if we take into account the other assets? And what's the relationship between this and bandwidth consumed on the Internet?
Discuss.
7 comments:
Interesting! Your plot seems to agree with Figure 1 in this study that includes the top 1000 web sites from 1995 to 2007:
Average Web Page Size Septuples Since 2003
The trend is going towards doing more declaratively: Microdata, the data-* attributes, the video element, new input types and so on are clear signs.
I assume, that with more and more HTML5 features coming into play the HTML for a piece of content will naturally increase.
An important metric, however, would be, if, and how much, the net content of the page increased. Are there more teasers, more copy text, and so on than in 1996?
Too many people design web sites that look like this.
Considering that most pages have at best 1-10KiB of worthy textual content, I don't know how they've managed to produce such a crapfest.
You can get a lot more historical data from the HTTP Archive Project which is doing similar analysis: http://httparchive.org/
You're clearly overfitting the data with the exponential fit. Just because it has a higher R^2 doesn't prove anything. Linear is probably the only one that would make sense for that data set.
I would expect to see the byte count decrease in the future as such sites move towards client-side content. For example, gmail.com is a single small page that is populated by client side JavaScript calls. Measuring the size of an HTML file may not reflect the growth in complexity.
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