Someone who orks cows recently pointed me at an article on cio.com about managing geeks. (Here's the link I got, in case anyone wants to see it.)
Today's rant is not about the content of this article; the content is, to the extent I'm competent to evaluate it, spot on, and needs to be far more widely disseminated. Today's rant is about the presentation. (I've ranted about form-over-content before; this is just another slant on it, in the form of a particularly egregious example.)
This small piece, maybe ten screenfuls of the 80x24 sort that I still consider standard, could have been just put up there as a page, for them as wanted to read. But, no. Instead, it was broken up into no fewer than six pages, each one of which contained maybe two screenfuls of content.
Two screenfuls. Out of, according to lynx, 43. Less than five percent of each page was content.
But wait. That's five percent of the rendered page. Watching lynx's download size indicator while fetching the pages indicates that each one of those six pages is roughly an eighth of a megabyte. An eighth of a megabyte containing maybe three kilobytes of content.
That's more like one part in 40.
To be sure, a little of that 97.5% is stuff that actually makes sense, such as links to a elsewhere on the website. I could see, perhaps, even as much as 100% overhead. But 3900% overhead is just, well, insane.
And they couldn't even be arsed to provide the "skip to the content" link I've seen at the top of a few of the more intelligently done Web pages. The top of the page is a pile of links all runtogetherwithoutanyspaces:
CIO.com White PapersWebcastsEventsCouncilSolution CentersNewslettersMagazineMOREEverything ElsePODCASTSBLOGGERSMAGAZINESITEMAPVirtual ConferencesSecurity Directions
And the real problem? Nobody seems to even notice this sort of crap, much less care about it.