Introducing Slowww.ml – the slow web server

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/10/introducing-slowww-ml-the-slow-web-server/

#html5 #php.web

@Edent nothing loaded for me!

@Edent Hosting error for me

@Edent Er, well I get this immediately

ALT

@Edent works on Firefox android, for what it's worth. I miss progressive jpg loading.

@Edent
Cool idea!

The image doesn't actually load. And something about it messes with the positioning of the page. While an image "loads" I can't actually scroll away to follow the text that's being displayed - the browser keeps jumping back to the image. Which, again, never seems to actually load.

I gave up after that.

@Edent Well it worked for me - nice and slow! Apart from the slow loading image - just got a broken image symbol even after the webp image loaded.

@Edent Just this screen.

@Edent Worked as expected for me! Thanks for putting it together 👍

@Edent on phone...

ALT

@Edent lol! It took additional 30 seconds on safari for iOS (how anyone uses Safari on iOS is crazy). The progressive jpeg images didn’t load! And finally your toot may have killed the site 🤣

ALT

@Edent ...it doesn't and there was a certificate problem, is the trojan horse or RAT now installed? 😉

@Edent Firefox 131.0.3 on Mac 13.6.9. It all loaded fine, except the first "slow loading image" Had to do a reload for that to show up. Also got a "This site/page has used all available resources allowed for a free hosting account" message. Fun page. Reminded me of programming on a teletype interface in the 1970's.

@Edent Oh wow, even `view-source:...` loads one character at a time! Nice!

@Edent The webp didn't seem to work in floorp (which is firefox based)

@Edent works for me

@Edent

This is remarkable. The only 'failure' was that the WebP image didn't display on Firefox mobile on Android.

131.0.3 (Build #2016050031), hg-e69783530d6d+
GV: 131.0.3-20241011205646
AS: 131.0

Now do 110 baudot and we can do Telegraph simulation of circa 1870. How 5 bits get into 7 bits is an exercise for the reader.

@Edent works fine on Chrome in iOS. Didn’t have time to wait for *all* of it 😂 but I see no reason why the rest would not have worked.

@Edent WEBP and TTS didn't work (Firefox/Ubuntu).

@Edent yes, it loaded correctly on my Fennec browser, watched it load and work its way till the very end.

Very informative and very nicely done!

Thanks for sharing, @Edent! This is lovely!

@Edent It all worked for me on Firefox on EndeavourOS Arch Linux - very enjoyable!

@Edent
It works for me. There is a typo in JPEG compression.
Very slow.

@Edent
I didn't get either of the first two images, nor either voice clip. The SVG loaded, and built up slowly.
(DDG browser on Android 13.)

@Edent I got a <title> pretty quickly, then nothing for a bit, but now it's coming at me as god intended (and I suspect as you had hoped) — character by character!

Safari 18.0.1 on macOS 15.0.1.

@Edent Sure it does... slow. Also:

@Edent on iPhone Safari: took about 45 seconds for anything to appear, then progressive downloading. It wasn’t possible to usefully read the page while it downloaded as the browser automatically scrolled to the bottom of the page with every new addition.

@Edent works for me (Firefox 131.0.2 (aarch64))

@Edent Yep, all good except for the Browser Speak - may be because I have most things turned off. The auto scroll to the bottom didn't work while the rabbit pic was loading. I'm a pre-internet person who started on dialup.

@Edent nothing after 45 seconds on Safari on MacOS. After a minute some characters appeared. Like days of old

@Edent that was diverting.

@Edent that was cute and fun :)

@Edent

I absolutely love this!

It seems to be stuck announcing readiness of the audio:

scrolling to the bottom whenever a new line of text appears. There is a tiny scrap of JavaScript firing every second.
OK! That audio should have

@Edent Oh very nice! Works fine on Firefox 131.0.3 on Fedora 40; two minors, I could swear I had to click twice on the first 'Play this audio' , also the oscillator based sound is LOUD.

@Edent That’s really cute! With a great message too. Great work ☺️

A few questions and some feedback! I’ll post in separate messages, if you don’t mind ☺️

@Edent Probably late to the party, but nothing loaded here. "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading."
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:131.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/131.0

@Edent The slow website worked fine for me. It reminded me of time spent on bbs. [added: Chrome on Samsung tablet running Android.]

@Edent I just bailed out when you started loading the Webp whole the Jpg was still coming down on my phone, but the text loading means the page doesn't let me see the rabbit appear anymore on a narrow device.

Is it possible to detect screen width and send a different version of the formatting CSS maybe?

@Edent It worked for me. Nice site btw

@Edent It did, yes. Some content about slow content loading and 20 characters/second average reading rate and some other stuff.

@tink cool! Thanks for the feedback.

@Edent It did play a bit of havoc with my screen reader though - I suspect because as the content gradually loaded it forced the DOM to rebuild which in turn forced the accessibility tree to be rebuilt.

@tink youch! Sorry about that.

@Edent No need to aologise. It's an experiment after all 😊

@Edent Have you tested your images encoded with JPEGli as a progressive JPEG? I’ve found them to be roughly the same size as webP (I have a tool at https://github.com/jphastings/jpegli or brew install jphastings/tools/jpegli — but you’d need to compile it yourself for q=10!)

@Edent The type-as-it-arrives JavaScript is awesome! I’ll definitely be viewing the source when I get to a proper machine ☺️ What gave you the idea?

@Edent Some feedback (please ignore if you wish; you didn’t ask for it!):

The JavaScript *forcing* me to the bottom meant I couldn’t read the top until the end (cos I missed the page finishing loading 😅)

The Opus audio didn’t work on my iPhone/Arc browser.

That’s it! Thank you!

ALT

@byjp The forcing to the bottom is a trade-off. I wanted people focusing on what was happening, rather than skipping back and waiting for it to load.

As for Opus? Fuck Apple 😆

@byjp It isn't JavaScript 🙂
It is *literally* a very slow web server.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/10/introducing-slowww-ml-the-slow-web-server/

@byjp I released the website a few years before JPEGli was a thing.

@byjp just playing with it.
The README says "WebP images are likely to be a little larger"
Should that be "smaller"?