Something that continues to bemuse me is why so many web pages continue to split content across so many pages. I can understand in the early days that there was a need to save the amount of information transmitted per page, in order for pages to load in a sensible time. But now, it is the forming of the connection and commencement of downloading that takes time—once a page has started to download, the actual content seems to download very quickly.

Forums are particularly bad at this; frequently, I see things like this:

I don’t see the point; it takes me a few seconds to read quickly through ten entries, then about the same amount of time to load the next ten, during which my continuous partial attention flicks to another page on the screen. I’d much rather load the whole thing and then read through it all.

I can see one exception, and that is where advertisers are paying each time the page is loaded (but, I understand that this is a rare model these days).

Some sites have taken to downloading more when you reach near the end of a page, a kind of continuous stream of posts; this seems better.

The apotheosis of this can be seen in the emails I get every few months from a second-hand book dealer whose catalogue I signed up for a few years ago. These consist of around 10 separate plain-text emails, in order to “send this by e-mail while minimising problems with formatting and size”. It is astonishing how quickly that sort of thing has gone from being a necessity to being something that looks really weird and outdated.

3D printing is an exciting new technology. But I wonder what it might be used for, in practice? I’m sat here in the sitting room in my father’s house, and I struggle to see many things that could be readily produced using such technology. The room contains:

• Large items of furniture, too large for this technology to produce
• Complex technological items like a laptop and a television, too complex to be created using 3D printing
• Lots of newspapers, books and magazines. These could be readily printed using 2D printing technology. If I were to invest in a technological replacement for these, it would be an iPad or similar.
• Several plants. Several craft items, like vases and knitted decorations. Dried flowers. I could imagine that it might be possible to create some interesting ornaments and vases using this kind of technology, but less so the complex craft objects: but, it might be possible to create some of the supporting tools (e.g. knitting needles) using such technology.
• Clothes, pairs of shoes, etc. Probably not readily creatable using that sort of technology.
• A christmas tree and decorations. Probably all rather creatable using 3D printing, even the (plastic) tree.
• Mugs, glasses, plates. Don’t know; might need very specialised materials.

Of course, this is hardly the point. The excitement is about creating new kinds of things that couldn’t be bespoke-built before; furthermore, there are clear applications in specific work environments such as laboratories and rapid-prototyping. But, I do worry that in the domestic environment this is just a sophisticated way of creating some fancy jelly-moulds and ice-cube trays. Is this destined to be the Breville toastie-maker of the 21st century?

For the last few days the Amazon UK home page has had the following graphic:

The idea here is clearly to convey that there is something important going on here, something that you, the customer, should take a minute or two of your day to attend to.

But, to me, it doesn’t work. It comes across as an exception to the normal reading of the page—which was the intention—but, not in a good way. It is overserious. The “Dear Customer” is rather jarring, and makes you expect something like “In recent days you will have read stories concerning amazon.co.uk in the press; we would like to refute these allegations in the strongest terms…” or something else rather negative.

The general lesson here is, I suppose, that you have to be very careful when leaping out of the regular visual language of web pages. It is very easy to get the reader to attend to something presented in a different visual language—but then, you need to ensure that they are getting the right implication from it.