As of last night I have abandoned using Sourceforge outside anything except lynx from my home connection (and even that from a remote server through ssh). You can’t blame the SF team for the cool work they all do, however the unfortunate update a few months back to their new CSS based layout has wreaked havoc across a population of open source developers who live and work without broadband. Maybe it’s the new graphical ads that have emerged, the Google text ads occupying the top of every page or even their CSS scheme. Whatever it is it’s unuseable – quite literally in my case. It’s taking long minutes to load even a simple page and its just no longer worth using from home. I didn’t even really notice the trend in my usage until recently. Where once I used SF quite regularly its now become a rare occurance…for no reason other than bandwidth issues quietly and gradually pushing me towards using Freshmeat or just plain Google instead.

Hopefully someone on the SF team will address the issue as the site is updated more substantially, but the trend over the last year or two has been to increase overall HTML and CSS filesizes without regard for we 56Kers. I just hope the recent trend towards CSS2 continues (with proper use!) – its incredible what a difference proper use of CSS makes to those of us on slow connections – it may not even be considered by designers, but cacheable compact CSS and XHTML files can increase a slow connection’s display speed two or even threefold compared to using tables and older HTML standards. Misusing them has the opposite effect – but that’s pretty rare to be honest and usually on legacy web apps.

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  1. Broadband, AATraders, QS Changes and my usual ramble ;)