Here is an example of what I'm talking about: https://www.heavensgate.com/
This is a website from a cult that committed suicide in the 1990s. This is irrelevant to the thread.
When you click on their links, they are very snappy, why is that exactly?
death to america
Old websites like this are almost nothing but HTML, and most of the styling is done through that as well. HTML is basically just a description of a document formatting, so like the header and body and title and stuff. Browsers today support more complicated styling via CSS which means it will spend more time making things pretty. Browsers today also support JavaScript, so they can basically run arbitrary code on a website. That enables all kinds of modernizations and stuff, but the costs are that you need to download way more data, and then your computer has to spend more time actually running that code. All of that takes time, especially if things aren't optimized very well. So the old internet is basically loading text and the new internet is running a program.
Css doesn’t slow down websites that much either though. It’s when you start adding a ton of different css that links to JavaScript just to load an image. And all the plugins that link to other sites to track visitors across the web.
Yeah, iirc, a CSS file is normally less than 1kb if you're handwriting it for a small static website. Should load instantly.
Yeah, I guess that's more what I was getting at. I am not a web dev by trade, I'm just aware that stylesheets are often another of the things that gets downloaded.