Fred Bauder wrote:
The issue is always download speed when we serve a diverse international audience and at least make noises about serving the poor and the third world. Serving up articles over 100kb long with several images each over 200kb will basically stop a slower computer with limited memory operating with a modem in its tracks, sometimes even requiring a reboot. Essentially the site becomes unusable.
The size of the article source text has little correlation with the size of the HTML output, so that argument is not relevant to this discussion.