I like your sentiment Chris ... However,
I feel that a "law" is not the way to go. The net is basically a very free place, and needs to be preserved that way at all costs. The only time that bandwidth suffers is when people actually load those pages. Web authors, such as myself, try to keep graphics usefully and informational, yet small enough to keep load time reasonable. Any site which uses large, obnoxious graphics will soon find that their pages are seldomn viewed more than once, if at all.
The majority of the profeesional web developers are loosely complying to a policy of small graphics. I think that the problems are occuring with the small, freelance authors.
A really good solution I can think of is for internet service providers who allow users to set up their own pages had a method of limiting the size of files that their web servers will serve out. Since this does not affect the size of downloadable files which usually use the ftp server, this will not impact on software of archival downloads. It would only affect actaul web pages (which are usually incredibly small anyway) and graphics and sound files (which can be quite large).
My $.02 worth.
-Eric |
