Ask HN: Is web app “specific gravity” a good metric?

19 points

11 years ago

I realized, like many of us, that I have been consuming a lot of tasty, long form content on Medium lately. It has evolved exactly into a kind of macro-micro-blog.

But yesterday a page was loading slowly, despite the minimalist layout and I decided to "view source" to find the culprit. And there was a 40K LoC closure compiled behemoth.

The Medium home page contains about 25 story links. The web app loads about 500kB (gzip) of html, js, css. Ignoring images, and assuming each story link contains about 1kB of information this yields a very low info to app density.

Formally we define the web app information density to be the amount of human-usable information on the page (number of unicode chars * 16-bits for example) divided by the size of the web app payload. The value can be normalized against some "ideal" value for comparison sake.

Is this a meaningful metric?

And is Medium.com's 8% specific gravity optimal?

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