Last night, Houston app developer Jeff Kibuule asked me a somewhat odd question on Twitter:

@dsilverman Do you find yourself going to websites less because the images aren’t retina quality on your new iPad? — Jeff Kibuule (@hitechjeff) March 27, 2012

I responded with “no, not at all”. It never occurred to me to avoid the Web on my iPad just because the graphics aren’t pixel-perfect. I go the Web to get information or communicate with others, and I don’t really care if some of the images have a case of the jaggies on the retina display of the new iPad.

But after digging into some discussions on this topic, I decided to visit a site I knew had added high-resolution graphics for the iPad — Apple’s own website. Sure enough, there’s a remarkable difference in the way the site looks when compared to viewing it on a traditional-resolution display.

Unfortunately, it’s also a much “heavier” site. Because the graphics are higher-resolution, their file sizes are bigger, which means they take more time to load. How much bigger? Ryan Block of gdgt points out:

Preview of the Retina future: “The total size of [Apple.com] goes from 502.90K to 2.13MB with the retina versions of images.” — Ryan Block (@ryan) March 26, 2012

Block is drawing from this blog post from startup Cloud Four in which author Jason Grigsby looks at how Apple is serving high-resolution graphics from its site to new iPads that come calling. The bad news: New iPads coming to Apple.com get both regular and retina-resolution images downloaded. That increases load time and, if you’re using LTE on a new iPad, chews up your data allowance for the sake of pretty pictures.

Which is not to say, of course, that pretty pictures are never worth it. There are great websites where the overall experience is paramount, and that includes its visual appeal. While I have yet to visit a site on the new iPad that turns me off because it looks bad, I have seen some things that make me go “eewww“. Facebook, for example, is notorious for serving up low-quality versions of pictures, and there are some pages there in which photos look ghastly on a new iPad. Now, there may be other reasons to avoid Facebook, but pixilated pictures isn’t one of them. (To be fair, Facebook is taking steps to improve the way it displays images.)

The new iPad’s display has already caused concern about the size of apps which now must incorporate higher-resolution graphic components. That’s caused apps to balloon in size, and if you have a lot of them on your iOS device, they can require significantly more storage. And because many apps are universal – there’s one file for both iPhone/iPod and iPad devices – it affects all users of those apps, not just iPad owners.

You might figure that the relatively low number of new iPads means site operators won’t have to worry about serving higher-resolution images for a while. But Apple sells a huge number of these – the company sold more than 15 million in the last quarter of 2011 – and they’ll quickly ramp up. In addition, competitors will launch retina-quality tablets of their own, and while they likely won’t hit the iPad’s sales numbers for a while, they’ll still add to the population of tablets with retina capabilities. Note that Windows 8, which has an interface designed for tablets, will have full retina display support when it launches later this year.

I suspect that, by the end of 2012, every website operator will be struggling with the decision about whether to improve the quality of graphics and pictures on their sites.

Sites can be configured to determine the technology being used by the devices requesting information from them, and serving images accordingly. That means people surfing the Web with displays that can’t benefit from high-resolution displays won’t be served those bigger files. But those who are using retina displays will see a slower Web as pages take time to load bigger graphics.

Unfortunately, sites can’t determine whether a device is using cellular broadband or Wi-Fi, which means those coming to sites with retina-capable displays on tiered and capped data plans are going to be using up a lot more of their data allowances. A better-looking Web could end up being a more costly Web, as well.

That will also be true for site operators, who often pay their Internet providers based on the amount of data they serve.

Is a better-looking Web worth the trade-off to you? As displays improve, are you willing to put up with slower page loads or faster depletion of your monthly data allowance? Let us know in the comments.