I shipped a working landing page in 14 KB — source summary

A dev.to article (by “thegdsks”, May 2026) on radical web-performance minimalism. Delivered via Telegram, ingested 2026-05-29. Text in raw/landing-page-14kb.md.

What it argues

• Frames the bloat problem: the median 2025 web page weighs ~2,600 KB (desktop), while a demoscene coder shipped a working 256-byte ZX Spectrum intro. “The 2026 web page is the same size as a 1996 SimCity install, minus the cities, plus a cookie banner.”
• Goal: the floor for a usable, production-grade landing page (headline, value prop, three feature blocks, form, footer, analytics; accessible, decent typography).
• Result: 14 KB total over the wire — one TCP slow-start window, rendering in <50 ms on a midrange Android.
• Byte budget: HTML 4 KB, CSS 3 KB, JS 0 KB, web fonts 0 KB (system fonts), images 6 KB (inline SVG). Walks through it “line by line.”

Migrated from the research-wiki into this dedicated web-performance wiki (2026-05-29) — the first source here. See synthesis for the working thesis.