No way would I be able to out-expert drauk on any of this, but doing a View Source (of this entire thread so far), saving it as a file and looking at the size of the file, yields 115,000 bytes.
I do think that is way way excessive, for the information content!!
OK, this is the problem with all web-based discussion boards, but I am certain one could reduce this by several times. Think of the benefits reaped on both server CPU activity and bandwidth used.