I already make compact web sites compared to my peers -- no jQuery, optimized images, mostly text-driven. No JS is required to navigate and view the site. A hair over 100 kb for most of sites, including blog and header image. I use global CDNs. So my sites are friendly to users in developing countries, as long as they don't use Opera Mini.
There's nothing "bleeding edge" about supporting JS and CSS that IE8 supports. That's as low as I'm going, and no guilt about it.
By the way, have you actually tested any of your sites on Opera Mini? You may be surprised at just how poorly it renders, unless you're still working with tables.
Unless you have some new machine learning approach to work out all the platform quirks and arrive at pure fallback nirvana?
It's like expecting the developers of the latest, greatest PC game to write a progressively enhanced game that the same executable will run on DOS 1.0 all the way to the latest Windows version. They will spend time and resources on making sure it works with DOS 1.0, even though there are next to zero users for it, making it completely uneconomical, basically working for free.
Or you can have them click the download Chrome/Firefox link.
As a moderately seasoned developer, I've seen this in my friends too (you know who you are). They get excited by the latest and greatest technology (which is great and they should) and they apply it to their business without first asking themselves if it's actually beneficial (which is bad and they shouldn't).
Most of them come around to "build it simple at first and optimize later", or YAGNI, but in the mean time, we get things like The Next Web.
$5 TNW's next iteration is plain HTML and simple CSS with a minimal amount of JS and they make a big thing out of how performant their site is now, loading instantly, etc. Good job, you discovered Web 1.0 again, but this time with better designers.
> TNW's next iteration … loading instantly
Games aren't a fair comparison; very few sites are anything like games, and gaming has always been pushing the boundaries of technology.
A more favourable comparison would be shipping a "content reader app", based on Windows Metro APIs, when a plaintext file would do just fine (and would work on MSDOS 1.0, if it were ASCII).
The trend today is that sites are crashing my up-to-date Firefox browser[1] because they need a ton of Javascript to get the layout right.
I don't mind a fancy site but just let me get the information I need.
[1] I own a not so new smart phone that does the job well for everything else.
-posted using Opera Mini
Guess what? If you use simple, clean HTML and progressively enhance with JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 features then everyone can browse your site. Or you can use the absolute bleeding edge of everything, requiring every user to give your code a full VM on his machine (a JavaScript VM, granted — but it's still a VM), requiring that the user be on the absolute latest and greatest smartphone or highest-end desktop.
It's up to you.