The Big Belly of Web Development

by chromatic

James Bennett summarized the XML/JSON debate late last year, but in passing he referred to a more interesting point that deserves more attention.

The first section of I can't believe it's not XML! shows a graph of complexity in web sites. The left represents static, HTML only pages. The right indicates the world's largest and busiest sites--billions of hits per day with plenty of database traffic.

Most of the web is in the middle. (Most of the web is to the left of the middle.)

While it may interest some people to debate endlessly the tactics of scaling to Top 200 Internet Sites traffic with huge clusters of high-powered database servers, it's far, far more interesting to me to discuss what the millions of sites the rest of us run can do to meet the needs of our visitors efficiently or effectively.

Put another way, I don't particularly care about the issues that concern only the largest 1% of all potential readers. I prefer to reach the 80% in the big belly.


2007-03-15 06:19:28
I'm seeing three dimensions here. If the 2-D graph in the link is tech complexity vs. web site popularity and business complexity, the number of web sites with that tech complexity or popularity/business complexity would be a third dimension (z or depth). (The 2-D graph would be the "squashed" version of this 3-D graph). And as x and y increase, z would start out low to low-middle, increase since you say most of the web is in the middle, hit a maximum to the left of the middle as you say, then abruptly drop off for that largest 1%.