Jeffrey Zeldman writes about Google's recent decision to take a web-page's loading speed into consideration when ranking sites. Designers were building to this spec for years, however broadband has allowed for designers to use complex languages, large images, @font-face, etc. all while writing standards compliant easily indexable code. Will the speed/ranking factor mean that a lot of these additional niceties will end up getting removed? Bare bones FTW?

"You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests."