Why is this page so ugly?

Once upon a time, physicists at CERN needed to share information with their colleagues all over the world. In late 1990, a computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, in collaboration with Robert Cailliau, developed a hypertext solution to the problem, which he called the Worldwide Web.

Then came graphic designers, and marketing experts, and advertising experts, all of whom tend to look at Internet sites through high end computers attached to high speed connections. Many of these people saw the Web as an extension of traditional media. Many of these people were awestruck by the Web's potential as a new artistic medium. They deployed all of the image-making techniques honed in print and television. They developed new techniques, blending the depth of print with the immediacy of television. They brought all the power of leading edge computer animation to PC screens all over the world.

There was only one problem. Most of the audience was, and is, at the other end of a dialup telephone line, using computer systems that lag far behind the state of the art. Pretty pages take time to download. A single moderately complex graphic will have a larger file size than this entire page. And so the Worldwide Web became known as the Worldwide Wait.

Jakob Nielsen writes, in his book Designing Web Usability, "Every web usability study I have conducted since 1994 has shown the same thing: Users beg us to speed up page downloads." Human factors research shows that users need response times of less than one second to maintain their chain of thought. When response times climb over ten seconds, users will lose focus, turning to other tasks while they wait for the computer to finish.

On this site, we've made a conscious design to put as few obstacles as possible between our readers and the information they need. We don't object to graphics per se. If a chart or figure makes an important point, we'll include it. Animations and audio clips have legitimate uses, too. We just don't see any reason to clutter your screen with eye candy that clogs your connection without adding value.

Simple pages are easier to create and update, too. We're able to spend our time and resources giving you reasons to come back, not tweaking HTML code.