MAML: Towards a Faster Web in Developing Regions

TL;DR

The paper tackles suboptimal web performance in developing regions caused by heavy web bloat and JS complexity. It introduces MAML, a flat-DOM web specification with a minimal scripting layer (MAMLScript) and a transpilation pathway to standard HTML/JS/CSS, plus a web editor and translator to enable practical adoption. Benchmark results across 100 pages show MAML delivering tens-of-seconds speedups and median data savings (~1 MB vs AMP, ~2.4 MB vs original), with visual similarity to originals often surpassing AMP by up to 30%. Human usability studies with 25 students indicate that, when aided by editor tooling, MAML pages maintain high functional similarity to originals, though some missing features await full MAMLScript support; overall, MAML offers meaningful improvements for bandwidth-constrained regions while preserving backward compatibility.

Abstract

The web experience in developing regions remains subpar, primarily due to the growing complexity of modern webpages and insufficient optimization by content providers. Users in these regions typically rely on low-end devices and limited bandwidth, which results in a poor user experience as they download and parse webpages bloated with excessive third-party CSS and JavaScript (JS). To address these challenges, we introduce the Mobile Application Markup Language (MAML), a flat layout-based web specification language that reduces computational and data transmission demands, while replacing the excessive bloat from JS with a new scripting language centered on essential (and popular) web functionalities. Last but not least, MAML is backward compatible as it can be transpiled to minimal HTML/JavaScript/CSS and thus work with legacy browsers. We benchmark MAML in terms of page load times and sizes, using a translator which can automatically port any webpage to MAML. When compared to the popular Google AMP, across 100 testing webpages, MAML offers webpage speedups by tens of seconds under challenging network conditions thanks to its significant size reductions. Next, we run a competition involving 25 university students porting 50 of the above webpages to MAML using a web-based editor we developed. This experiment verifies that, with little developer effort, MAML is quite effective in maintaining the visual and functional correctness of the originating webpages.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: SI versus median complexity metrics as measured via Lighthouse for 100k developing regions websites.
• Figure 2: MAML editor's user interface featuring a) canvas of size 1200$\times$800px; b) toolbar; c) import MAML file or existing url to translate; d) download a .maml file of the current design e) save & preview the resulting HTML version of the page; f) add interactivity using drag-and-drop listeners and triggers.
• Figure 3: MAML vs. Original (ORG) and AMP in web performance metrics (FCP, SI, PLT), page sizes, and visual similarity.
• Figure 4: Developed MAML webpages in terms of their functional similarity to Original webpages, their size comparison to the "translated" MAML webpages, and the delta size ("translated" - "developed") correlation as a function of webpage complexity.
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