It's 2012, and I'm using a lousy hotel wi-fi shared by 503 guests that takes me back to 1997 connection speeds.
No wonder PDF is the solution. Sure, sites should be optimized to the fullest extent possible and probably even detect connection speeds and offer a low bandwidth version (are there libraries for this already?) when appropriate; but that's a huge amount of work (and money) for what basically are outliers (I wouldn't expect many people to browse the Campers site from a lousy wi-fi in Bangkok)
I am on unshared 12Mbps ADSL, not the fastest around but surely faster than 1997 connection speeds and my experience was similar. Around 20 seconds for the initial loading and 5-10 for each collection. I am glad I wasn't actually looking to buy shoes and just checking the times the content took to load so I wouldn't say this design example is a problem just for the outliers.
That wasn't my experience. It would be interesting to arrive at the bottom of the problem. I take it I'm being served a different page than you are, maybe due to location (I'm not on the US, but then, neither was the article author)
No wonder PDF is the solution. Sure, sites should be optimized to the fullest extent possible and probably even detect connection speeds and offer a low bandwidth version (are there libraries for this already?) when appropriate; but that's a huge amount of work (and money) for what basically are outliers (I wouldn't expect many people to browse the Campers site from a lousy wi-fi in Bangkok)