It's not necessarily stupid. Right now, Wolfram Alpha is being hit from everybody that follows tech news, and so it's taking a huge load of hits. The delayed loading doesn't come from the images: look at the page as it loads and you'll see that the longest delays are coming not from the process of loading the image but from performing all the necessary calculations in the background. That's the slow part.
"Infuriatingly" is a bit of a harsh descriptor, don't you think? There are a few things that make text better than images online, and loading time is rarely one of the factors. The first issue is indexing - but Wolfram Alpha's results are so specific to the question asked that there's not much being lost if they're worrying only about providing a useful service and not one that Google hits on. The second issue is interactivity - but they provide easily copied text, so they're taking care of that one. (That may help indexing as well.)
Meanwhile, providing information as images means no time fiddling with style on their part, and it means I can very easily transfer their generated image for use online or in files and have it look nice.
'Designery'? Do you mean, 'Styling that accurately and attractively shows the relationship between various pieces of text and their various importances'?
I was able to copy-and-paste from the result I got (as related in another reply in this thread), so I have no complaints about the format of the answers. If the answers hid the textual part of the answer so much that it couldn't be copied-and-pasted (as I frequently find in addresses on websites of businesses), I would be annoyed, but I can deal with Alpha as it now is.
Comments
Using poorly-rendered (but 'designery') images to represent textual results is infuriatingly stupid.
Especially when there's a FOUC -- perfectly nice plain text is replaced with gross slowly-loading images.
It's not necessarily stupid. Right now, Wolfram Alpha is being hit from everybody that follows tech news, and so it's taking a huge load of hits. The delayed loading doesn't come from the images: look at the page as it loads and you'll see that the longest delays are coming not from the process of loading the image but from performing all the necessary calculations in the background. That's the slow part.
"Infuriatingly" is a bit of a harsh descriptor, don't you think? There are a few things that make text better than images online, and loading time is rarely one of the factors. The first issue is indexing - but Wolfram Alpha's results are so specific to the question asked that there's not much being lost if they're worrying only about providing a useful service and not one that Google hits on. The second issue is interactivity - but they provide easily copied text, so they're taking care of that one. (That may help indexing as well.)
Meanwhile, providing information as images means no time fiddling with style on their part, and it means I can very easily transfer their generated image for use online or in files and have it look nice.
'Designery'? Do you mean, 'Styling that accurately and attractively shows the relationship between various pieces of text and their various importances'?
I was able to copy-and-paste from the result I got (as related in another reply in this thread), so I have no complaints about the format of the answers. If the answers hid the textual part of the answer so much that it couldn't be copied-and-pasted (as I frequently find in addresses on websites of businesses), I would be annoyed, but I can deal with Alpha as it now is.