On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 01:15:16PM -0400, Terry Reedy wrote:
marked as having new content. At your leisure, you open it (or perhaps you have marked it 'download updates in background'). That that takes longer with a slow connection is no different than with other text streams. If you type in a comment, even 1200 baud upsteam is fast enough. Where do you get 'punitive' in this?
I visited my parents at Christmas. They live in a rural area, don't have great phone lines, and my dad's computer ends up getting about a 21Kb modem connection (not even 38.4!). I discovered that great swaths of the Web 2.0 world were effectively unusable for me; after login, the Twitter home page took 3 minutes to display. Logging into my bank was a tortuous 10 minute process. I never succeeded in getting into Facebook at all. Many pages don't render until they're completely downloaded. The little AJAXy update that adds an extra second or two on a fast connection becomes shockingly painful on a slow connection. The JS files are organized Unless Google Wave is written with attention to such slow connections (which I doubt -- such users are pretty rare, after all), I would assume it will be unusable. The bandwidth is enough for a character by character stream, but web browser apps impose many overheads atop that stream. --amk