[Python-Dev] Google Wave as a developer communication tool

[A.M. Kuchling]

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