Bruce Lawson talked about excluding China and India in his talk “How To Destroy The Web” at the FuturesInsightsLive Keynote last year.

In his sarcastic talk, he raised some very important issues about how as web developers, we often exclude China and India and highlights some key facts as to why this isn’t such a good idea and suggests how we as developers, could make our code more accessibly and reachable to a large proportion of people.

Watch Bruce Lawson’s talk here:

Both China and India are huge players in the web. With their total populations equating for around 40% of the worlds population, excluding them just seems stupid.

“The Proportion of people accessing the Internet by mobile increased enormously from 39.5% in late 2008 to 46% in June 2009”. This statistic shows that China have a lot of influence over the web due to its rapid increase in users and the drive for a mobile-first approach to web design. The statistic also revealed that close to 150 million people stopped using desktops and laptops to access the Internet and used mobile instead.

The same can be said for India with 1 in 2.3 people owning a smartphone, there is more smartphones than toilets. Comparing this to many older forms of technologies such as ATM Machines, there is only one in every 5000 Indians.

With many parts of both China and India still very underdeveloped and living in poverty, their Internet connections are far more weaker than ours in the UK. The problem with designing assuming that people will be viewing your website on a fiber-optic or 4G connection is that its unrealistic. In an ideal world, yeah playing 4K video would look lovely on your site, but who is really going to see it? — Truth is; you’ll get some kid in India not being able to view the site due to the huge javascript libraries that are unnecessary and uncompressed HD video.

In the talk, Bruce discussed writing your own Javascript codes to reduce the size of files needed to load. This makes it more accessible for those with poor internet speeds to still access the site. A image in the keynote stated that Sencha has 400K lines of code compared to around 1K lines that are actually needed. This reduces the size dramatically and avoids excluding many parts of the world, which has the potential to reach billions!

An example of a country excluding themselves using the Internet is Japan. Their government scheme called “ActiveX” aimed to allow for secure payments such as Internet Banking to be transacted. The issue is that the plugin only worked with Internet Explorer (IE) and you need a Windows machine to run IE. As a result 99% of Japan use IE as their browser due to no support on iPad, Android and Linux.

Jinho Jung, who worked on ActiveX, later said that it “led to international isolation of Korean IT.” And that it was an “Inconvenience for users”.

Tom.