Raw size isn't enough A few months ago there was a sequence of posts to Hacker News about various “clubs” you could post your small website on: the 1MB Club, 512KB Club, 250KB Club, and even the 10KB Club. I think those are a fun indicator of renewed interested in minimalism, but I will say that raw size isn’t enough – a 2KB site with no real content isn’t much good, and a page with 512KB of very slow JavaScript is worse than a snappy site with 4MB of well-chosen images. ...[Instead, it's about] an “ethos of small”. It’s caring about the users of your site: that your pages download fast, are easy to read, have interesting content, and don’t load scads of JavaScript for Google or Facebook’s trackers. Ben Hoyt, The small web is beautiful benhoyt.com minimalismcontentsize
The quality of thought It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site. Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture thinkinginformationsize
As inanimate as it was gigantic A Fragment by John Ruskin blog.ayjay.org And among such false means largeness of scale in the dwelling-house was of course one of the easiest and most direct. All persons, however senseless or dull, could appreciate size: it required some exertion of intelligence to enter into the spirit of the quaint carving of the Gothic times, but none to perceive that one heap of stones was higher than another. And therefore, while in the execution and manner of work the Renaissance builders zealously vindicated for themselves the attribute of cold and superior learning, they appealed for such approbation as they needed from the multitude, to the lowest possible standard of taste; and while the older workman lavished his labor on the minute niche and narrow casement, on the doorways no higher than the head, and the contracted angles of the turreted chamber, the Renaissance builder spared such cost and toil in his detail, that he might spend it in bringing larger stones from a distance; and restricted himself to rustication and five orders, that he might load the ground with colossal piers, and raise an ambitious barrenness of architecture, as inanimate as it was gigantic, above the feasts and follies of the powerful or the rich. architecturesizescale
What can be put into words It is not evident, though many people, from the early Greeks on, implicitly act as if it were true, that all things, whatsoever they may be, can be put into words—you could talk about anything: the gods, truth, beauty, and justice. But if you consider what happens in a music concert, then it is obvious that what is transmitted to the audience cannot be put into words—if it could, then the composer and musicians would probably have used words. All the music critics to the contrary, what music communicates cannot (apparently) be put into words. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, for painting. Poetry is a curious field where words are used but the true content of the poem is not in the words! Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn Everything that can be saidWhereof one cannot speak