The broadband market will grow 361% by the end of 2007 according to the Yankee Group. Right now, they say 58% of the market is using cable and a third is using DSL.
It would be a mistake to use this prediction as an excuse to heavy-up multimedia on our web sites. The performance of text-oriented web pages on broadband connections is still inferior to ink on paper. We ought to be focusing on improving the performance of our pages: removing tables, promoting text advertising, eliminating unnecessary graphics, and using CSS.
Let’s agree to confine our use of graphics and animation to applications where they make sense and not simply to dress up our content.