CNN is offering a lite version of its site for people on slow networks: lite.cnn.io (120K). The regular CNN page is nearly 3 MB

All news sites should do that in emergencies - great idea.

what if… they just did it all the time? You could just turn off images if you wanted the lite version. We have the technology

But… but… how would you monetize that?

Put it on the blockchain.

Not just images, IIRC CNN throws lots of video autoplaying at you too. You can still monetize lite sites too.

this is one of the best ui experiences i've had with a major news website

Drudge report has had this for many years I think

well, i'm glad they have that going for them at least, shame about the content though

Do you already know amp.cards ?

Nice! Stupid that it's needed, but nice that they provide it. If they were smarter, they'd just ramp the main page down and be done with it.

It'd be 20 KB w/o that massive JS script...¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...120k for...a <ul> of links. ....which are all dynamically loaded by javascript. oy.

Outputting lists of links from a database in chronological order isn't really a solved problem on the backend yet, let's use ajax for now

100k of minified js. But hey, the JSON of the actual content is actually nice and lite: dev-babelfish.api.cnn.io/api/v1/vertica…

I suppose serving page of HTML with a bit of CSS is waaay too difficult? Gotta have a framework in there to change a link colour...

The structure of the articles is impressive as well. Three copies of all the text. dev-babelfish.api.cnn.io/api/v1/detail/…

They must have hired those Outlook developers who include 2-5 copies of a message as different mime types every time you send an email.

Hey, that's neat: translation on the fly with an API dev-babelfish.api.cnn.io/api/v1/detail/…

Wait how else do you make a list appear, if not with JavaScript and virtual dom management?

cloud services!

No - I realise that old school ways are still best - should use a jpg with an imagemap

Wow, how is that not like just a couple k of semi static content? Looks like it would work in the 90s...

😂

Gripping stuff.

Sort of reminds me of the barebones Gmail site. mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq…

can we keep it forever?

Why is a literal list of text 120k??? #argh

This is what I'm confused about — JavaScript is what's taking up most of the data, but is it really needed? The answer may surprise you.

I'm seeing 7k for the page itself, and 228k for analytics.min.js. I ... wonder what that does?

The regular page is less than 3 MB?

every major news site did this for 9/11 16 years ago Monday. Wish they had this option more often. @CNNyourmom

another good trick is to use mobile.twitter.com on desktop, ~200K vs ~10MB. No ads and better readability

But no dark theme :/