I stumbled across Page Weight Matters by Chris Zacharias where he briefly describes how he got a YouTube page down to 100 KB and the pain that caused him. He seems surprised to find that reducing the fluff on such a widely known site as YT would actually bring more people to the service, mostly those with slow internet connections or from very remote places, people the average interwebz citizen could maybe think about a little more often. If that’s too lofty for you, see it as an exercise in minimalism.
However, I was amused by the figures, still having much more restricting rules in mind, specifically the HTML Coding Manifesto (in German). The authors (ca 2000) were still thinking about compatibility with terminal browsers! After having thought for several years that their benchmarks were a bit too strict, I am happy to see their point made again, more than 10 years later.
Let’s keep it short, shall we?
Now, may I interest you in a website that I always admired for its completeness and simplicity, given its sole purpose, technical documentation? OpenBSD.org