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Front-End Developer Decries 'Garbage' Design Choices on 'The Bullshit Web' (pxlnv.com)
"Ever wondered why pages seem to load slower and slower? Or why it is that browsing seems to take just as long to load a page, even though your broadband connection doubled in speed a couple of months ago?" gb7djk, a long-time Slashdot reader, blames "the bullshit web" -- as described in this essay by Calgary-based front-end developer Nick Heer (who does his testing on a 50 Mbps connection).
A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web... When I use the word "bullshit" in this article, it isn't in a profane sense. It is much closer to Harry Frankfurt's definition in On Bullshit: "It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth -- this indifference to how things really are -- that I regard as of the essence of bullshit...." The average internet connection in the United States is about six times as fast as it was just ten years ago, but instead of making it faster to browse the same types of websites, we're simply occupying that extra bandwidth with more stuff. Some of this stuff is amazing.... But a lot of the stuff we're seeing is a pile-up of garbage on seemingly every major website that does nothing to make visitors happier -- if anything, much of this stuff is deeply irritating and morally indefensible.
Take that CNN article, for example. Here's what it contained when I loaded it:
- Eleven web fonts, totalling 414 KB
- Four stylesheets, totalling 315 KB
- Twenty frames
- Twenty-nine XML HTTP requests, totalling about 500 KB
- Approximately one hundred scripts, totalling several megabytes -- though it's hard to pin down the number and actual size because some of the scripts are "beacons" that load after the page is technically finished downloading.
The vast majority of these resources are not directly related to the information on the page, and I'm including advertising... In addition, pretty much any CNN article page includes an autoplaying video... Also, have you noticed just how many websites desperately want you to sign up for their newsletter?
The essay also deals harshly with AMP, "a collection of standard HTML elements and AMP-specific elements on a special ostensibly-lightweight page that needs an 80 kilobyte JavaScript file to load correctly....required by the AMP spec to be hotlinked from cdn.amp-project.org, which is a Google-owned domain. That makes an AMP website dependent on Google to display its basic markup, which is super weird for a platform as open as the web."
It argues AMP is only speedier "because AMP restricts the kinds of elements that can be used on a page and severely limits the scripts that can be used," calling it a pseudo-solution. "Better choices should be made by web developers to not ship this bullshit in the first place.... An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user's computer are used in a page's visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page."
Take that CNN article, for example. Here's what it contained when I loaded it:
- Eleven web fonts, totalling 414 KB
- Four stylesheets, totalling 315 KB
- Twenty frames
- Twenty-nine XML HTTP requests, totalling about 500 KB
- Approximately one hundred scripts, totalling several megabytes -- though it's hard to pin down the number and actual size because some of the scripts are "beacons" that load after the page is technically finished downloading.
The vast majority of these resources are not directly related to the information on the page, and I'm including advertising... In addition, pretty much any CNN article page includes an autoplaying video... Also, have you noticed just how many websites desperately want you to sign up for their newsletter?
The essay also deals harshly with AMP, "a collection of standard HTML elements and AMP-specific elements on a special ostensibly-lightweight page that needs an 80 kilobyte JavaScript file to load correctly....required by the AMP spec to be hotlinked from cdn.amp-project.org, which is a Google-owned domain. That makes an AMP website dependent on Google to display its basic markup, which is super weird for a platform as open as the web."
It argues AMP is only speedier "because AMP restricts the kinds of elements that can be used on a page and severely limits the scripts that can be used," calling it a pseudo-solution. "Better choices should be made by web developers to not ship this bullshit in the first place.... An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user's computer are used in a page's visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page."
The standards are not really that bad (well, maybe CSS isn't great). But the problem is when graphics and art people get done with a site. For example, I built a simple, in house web tool for a customer. It had a bit of JavaScript (which I minified) because it was doing lots of processing. But it was maybe ~120K to load everything. I didn't even bother with stuff like jQuery since the set of browsers I'm running on is well controlled.
But it didn't look good. I'm color blind and have no interest in making things aesthetic; I made it functional. The powers that be wanted it to be made pretty. It's now ~2MB because it loads fonts, jQuery, bootstrap and all sorts of stuff from all sorts of external servers. Which defeats a requirement that this work even when the Internet connection is down. The server for this content is an embedded device, which the web interface controls so there is no need for external Internet whatsoever.
But that's no longer the case once the 'web fartists' got through with it. Perhaps people should worry far less about visual appearance and far more about functionality. Not that you can't even make a visually appealing site without piles and piles of third party libraries.
So once the development culture of tossing all sorts of third party stuff anywhere it can be hammered in is dissolved then the web will come back to its original vision.
Everything is filler around the ads.
Servers now have the bandwidth, CPU power, RAM, OS, expert staff to be really great.
All that they are used for is pushing better ads.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I actually can't stand browsing the web without at least these two items running. The ads, scripts, and general fluff running on pages now is staggering. Not to mention the RAM and processor usage which could bring an obsolete computer to its knees.
Everything is compressed, and with the network performance asymmetry between throughput and latency, having larger resources like big CSS files don't impact users' perception of performance very much, nor would keeping the size of those resources the same vs slower broadband connections of the past help performance very much.
it's purpose is to speed up all that tracking bullshit (so you don't notice it as much), while also feeding google delicious data on the third party page views. google didn't create it for our benefit.. but for their's and they can fuck off.
Guy who lives in Calgary Canada is upset that websites in the US without a local CDN load slowly. First World problems.
The clients are. They want more and more stuff. If they see a feature another site has, then they bring it up in a meeting and decide they need that too. And then when it gets too slow they want to know why it's so slow.
never clicking on unwanted graphics that cover 1/3 of most pages.. use sites that arrow/pg keys work on without having to click anywhere.. /. seems to have heard the views & has cleaned up it's page? ++
Lunduke whined about this 14 months ago... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tefielQeHZY
This isn't something that large content publishers or hosting sites are going to address or change themselves. They don't really care how much data their page downloads, and the big ones like CNN don't even care how long the page takes to load. As long as they get their ad impressions, user profiling, and 27 different kinds of analytics then they're happy.
Individuals will need to take back control themselves. An adblocker and NoScript change CNN from a 30 second load to about 5 seconds. NoScript is the real champion, and yet it is so often maligned as "hard to use". The truth is that making sure the usual sites you visit work right takes just a few minutes, most sites work pretty well without scripts, and the vast majority work just fine if you enable first-party scripts only. And since it's the second and third (and fourth and fifth, ad infinitum) which load most of the garbage this is usually a good tradeoff.
What we really need (assuming it doesn't exist already?) is a curated whitelist for NoSciprt, like the subscription lists for AdBlock Plus. This would make the extension more user-friendly and allow a maximum level of functionality while still completely blocking a significant amount of unwanted and dangerous garbage.
Oh, and don't waste your time with a hosts file. It's completely useless in the age of dynamic DNS entries which appear and disappear on a daily or hourly basis.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Don't forget the admins here, they've modded your comment down and a few others.
Not being able to edit is a joke.
You must be referring to the "off shore resources" developing websites for pennies on the dollar. They don't care about UX or performance of a website, their only concern is will this pass pipeline testing and get released.
A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web... When I use the word "bullshit" in this article, it isn't in a profane sense. It is much closer to Harry Frankfurt's definition in On Bullshit: "It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth... So fake news?
When I visit "xyz.com", why should my browser need to connect to 1000 other websites just to get the homepage to load, any of which can contain potential browser exploits in order to inject malware.
First party sites can still host their own malware-free ads, and everything would be much faster, safer, and privacy preserving.
If advertisers require traffic evidence, they could still still opt to share their web logs, regularly timestamped by a trusted timestamp authority. It is still a better option that the current obstructive tracking we have now.
All it takes is for all of the non-Chrome browsers to make this a standard default.
Especially since Google would not allow this for Chrome, since it would impact their bottom line too much.
On a personally level, I am constantly complaining to my IT, that they are still using Google Analytics and other 3rd party trackers in our internal employee-only corporate website in our intranet.
When the typical response to a programming challenge these days is to google for another dependency library, what do you expect?
I hand-code all my AJAX and JS. Takes up maybe 50K for a heavily-commented page, maybe 7 for a stripped one.
I mean, why make the user load 200KB worth of garbage, so you can have a fader?
Of course, these dependencies are also written by hipsters that have the same approach to attacking problems, so you end up with mile-long dependency chains, and the hackers only need to find the one where the coder stayed up all weekend on Red Bull and crank, writing the Next Great Fader Library.
It's gotten so bad that one of our local news sites here produces near 100% CPU utilization of the (admittedly older) dual-core (4 logical cores) 2.4GHz processor running under Linux in my web-browsing PC. It pegs the CPU for nearly 30 seconds per page and I can't do much else during that time because of the high CPU usage.
Seriously... you need *that* much resource just to show us some text and a few pictures????
Ah, how fondly I remember the days of 1200/75 modems when good designers spent hours trying to make BBS screens load just a few seconds faster. These days, optimization and elegant simplicity are cuss-words within the online development community I guess.
I remember at one point when /. started taking over two minutes to show anything other than a blank page over dial-up (I was on dial-up until about a decade ago). There was absolutely no new content or functionality of any use (to the reader). If anything, the page layout was much worse to browse. I always thought it was odd a, in theory, technology oriented website would require so much bloat.
when i unclick the blocking all of the annoying ads come back on /.. on other sites the barrage of ads still comes up with the blocking on,, so still ++1/2 to /.
Well I doubt he picked Politico and CNN at random...
All the websites listed sure are lefty liberal fake news!
5 seconds is how long I'll wait for a page to load before I close the tab.
I use no script,. privacy badger and uBlock Origin.
I've also been known to use links.
Code doesn't run fast. That's ok buy more RAM, faster processor, disks, whatever. This is just the logical progression taken to the internet. I say blame bloated frameworks.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I don't think that's true. Look at Google's initial success. People loved the simplicity of a page with a single box on it that did what it was supposed to do. Developer's may make assumptions about what clients want, but most of us just want speed, simplicity, and content. The rest truly is bullshit.
I'm not saying that Google are breaking other DNS servers so they can take an early sniff at what you're looking at. But when they screwed the top off ISP hosting of emails they churned up a huge treasure trove. Anyway try changing your NIC to point the DNS to 8.8.8.8 and see if it speeds up loading. It certainly did for me after I found things were grinding to a halt.
OK. So I'm not the only one noticing this! Accessing the web now is HORRIBLE. Especially on a phone. It's like the web is back to dial up speeds. And when the page is finally loaded, what you have is a screen full of irrelevant garbage, like a flashy picture, and you have to haplessly scroll. No clear idea of what you are supposed to click on. No clear idea of if the page is loaded or if right before you click on something the image shifts and you click on something else.
Then theres the damned newsletter screen! Why did people all of a sudden start signing up for newsletters?? Didn't they stop doing that over a decade ago, maybe two? WHO THE HELL IS DOING THIS? The worst thing is you kinda know it's coming, but it's still just as annoying every time. Like a fullscreen popup add but worse. You could literally be on a website trying to buy something FROM THE WEBSITE and a freaking newsletter screen will pop up preventing you from doing it.
Then there is the whole navigation thing. In all these years of the internet you would think they'd figure out a way so that back returns you to where you were. Only to realize back really just reloads the page again which will take forever AGAIN and MAY but likely will not return you back to where you were. And what sucks is that these are the biggest, richest companies. It supposed to be the state of the art, and it already sucks.
To me the "content" is the useful bit I'm coming to see. For a news site, typically the actual write-up conveying some tidbit of news. Even that is debatable, as some news outlets (*cough* bbc *cough*) have a habit of writing a longish text that says the same thing three times over and wastes your time never actually adding much extra information, certainly not worth the while reading the text beyond the first few paragraphs. The trick is to scan for this repetition and stop reading in a timely fashion. Sometimes there's a picture but more and more often it's a stock photo that has no direct connection to the incident. The more the site has a habit of showing big-ish pictures ("optimised for tablets"), the more likely it is the pictures are stock.
For, say, twitter the actual useful payload is "up to 160 characters". Okay, it's 240 now, and it took them years to get there when all it should have taken was adjusting a single value. Shows how well that thing is designed, but I digress. Just wget a tweet. It's on the order of 30 kB, for the unadorned (and quite useless) bare HTML. Now load that same tweet with the network waterfall. It's easily a couple megabytes. That's a very large cruft multiplier.
I don't count that cruft as content. So the people who put that in there are not "content authors". I tend to simply call'em web monkeys.
The problem, as you rightly point out and it's been endemic since september, is exactly the wish to create an often literally picture perfect website "experience". As in the webmonkey gets a picture and orders to make the website "experience" provide an identical look and feel across all borders.
And then it gets worse, reinventing interfaces in ways that aren't useful to me, but just happen to be popular. The dreaded "automatically load more as you scoll down" for one, turning the scrollbar into a nuisance instead of a useful tool, causing me to curse webmonkeys yet again for a bunch of PHP-grade tools taking my useful and expected tools away. And so on, and so forth.
HTML was never designed to do that "experience" thing. So the webmonkey "just has to" muck around with all sorts of bullshit to somewhat make that limp along. I don't agree that the problem isn't in the standards, it's where the problems got set in stone. But the root cause is that HTML is (a rather inept attempt at providing) a vehicle to convey content that might end up rendered differently across devices, not "experience". That was supposed to be a feature, but the webmonkeys oversold "experience" and providing it has become a rather large industry full of crap, crud, and idiot webmonkeys.
An entire industry providing only homeopathic concentrations of what I think of as "content".
Trumptards can't even tell the difference between truth and lies. They're too busy whining and crying and blaming their own problems on everybody else I guess.
They're also dumber than rocks.
And now the marketing people have corrupted it. We will never get the 80s and 90s back.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
I get all my news from Russian intelligence officers pretending to be Americans.
>"the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web.."
LOL! You said it! That really is the BS web, especially if you throw in the websites of Huff, NYT, Salon, and WP! :) Sorry, couldn't resist.
.
I'm looking for a company's phone number and I have to wade through slow loading times and tons of scrolling in order to get to the phone number. When I finally do get there, the phone number is in some super low contrast grey-on-grey text.
I am a software developer, working on the backend of a popular website. Our frontend team gets excited every time they find out a new js library or a new font to add to our website, so the average page is now 3-4MB, thankfully still reasonably fast on quick connections. I say thankfully, because the web is full of really slow websites. Take the Trillion Dollar Company for example, Apple. Try using their itunesconnect website, no matter your connection, the pages will have to load stuff dynamically so you'll be waiting about 3-5 secs from a blank page to show you stuff. And quite often the blank page stays and you try shift reload a few times to get something. And you can't go from one place to the other with a single click - e.g. if you are viewing reviews on an app and you want to go to the other app, you click the other app, then activity, then ratings/reviews, then location. And that's definitely not the worse site, just one of the bad ones I have to use often. The web has become a bloated mess.
When it comes to bad web design, Fox News is just as bad. I need to use an ad blocker to get that site to render in a decent timeframe, and even then I get hit with autoplaying video content. The content itself seems to be a mix over simplified headline news articles, shamelessly biased opinion pieces, and a bunch of clickbait blog spam forwards the bottom of the page.
(Oh, and everything that I said there applies to CNN as well. Political opinions aside, it's like they both graduated summa cum laude from the school of partisan hackery.)
Perhaps one should learn intelligent systems administration techniques before ranting about "bullshit".
The mentioned web sites render very quickly on my system because I understand the technology stack fairly well.
Disk drive cache should only be used when broadband is unavailable or has a relatively high latency and fast solid state cache is unavailable.
Solid state drive cache drastically improves performance while still limiting repeatedly downloading the same resources over time.
I myself only use RAM cache with Firefox, since I don't go anywhere near my monthly cap limits.
Other browsers may require brute force (RAMDrive) approaches to avoid disk based cache, since Incognito modes of operation limit user experience.
Sincerely,
"Boss"
Preach it, brother.
So many web pages are so full of crap, it is hard to measure.
This reminds me of an old SNL sketch where they were making fun of this exact same concept only regarding TV news channels. They kept adding more and more crap onto the screen, until the anchor was just this tiny box in the corner, and then they say something like, "And here's a picture of a Terminator doll! It has nothing to do with this story, it just looks really cool!" and the picture of the Terminator doll finally covers up the anchor.
... that I've been bitching about for decades now.
Accepting Google's "free" gifts is a big problem.
There are sites that claim to be concerned about privacy, but if you block Google, important functionality stops. Often you can bang on buttons with no effect if Google is blocked. So, Google knows when you log in and what you're doing.
I'm of the opinion healthcare sites that send traffic to third party sites essentially notify others of patient visits without the typical patients' knowledge or permission. That looks like a HIPAA violation to me.
Strange how web coders will hard-wire "open source" third party resource version numbers in pages, yet won't simply copy those resources to local servers and access them from there. Hard-wiring the local copy's version takes the same effort, but avoids constant traffic to other sites.
Another annoying issue is unnecessary JavaScript. I suspect that comes from developers being able to bill more. Occasionally, one can visit sites that show a blank page if JavaScript is disabled - just a white blank page. Sad programming.
Not being able to edit is a joke.
This is actually for your own safety. Imagine if you had no prior experience with learning to live with the consequences of your mistakes?
Calling this bullshit is an affront to bull's shit, which is actually useful for numerous agricultural purposes. Indeed, the more bull's shit you have, the more productive your farm can be. The analogy doesn't fit to jQuery at all.
Yes, I'm aware I also called it "bullshit" 2 pages down. ;)
Are you out of your mind?? Google is the exception now, and frankly it has been an exception for a long time.
The average web page out there is loaded with more cruft and crap than you can shake a stick at! Even if there is a "most of us" that agrees with you (something I sincerely doubt), that "most of us" isn't in control of site design.
Thus, it makes no difference how many people love the Google search box. The Google search box isn't how 99.9% of the web is constructed these days.
They can tell the difference. They'd rather die and be damned to their own Hell by their own value set than admit it, but they can tell.
A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web...
Heh...does anyone on Slashdot seriously run without at least at least script blocking in place?
I know some folks complain the web doesn't work right and it takes some effort at times. To each his own. The rest of us have a much different web experience.
Note - If noone loaded those elements, they would fade away from use.
--- Mercutio was right.
That's what it is, bloated shit. This desire to make the web the platform for programs and applications has turned it into a totally-fucked hodge-podge of resource-sucking shit using bloated code and non-standard solutions.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
finally... the bullshit comes out
glad that you brought this up.
thanks dude
I've read slashdot since 1999 or so. Mod system is broken. I wish slashdot could evolve to be a protocol more than "a site" and also, that they'd draw some ideas to evolve the Slashdot ideals, which is about curation of nerdy discussions and so much needed in today's world where 99% of the content is a complete waste of time. It's also been ages since I was offered meta moderation. I am sure the Slashdot owners think they have lost to better tools. But it's not. They are just failing to know how to evolve something that is needed much more today, than it ever was yesterday.
unfinished: (adj.)
...because they test it themsleves and demonstrate it to management and clients using high-bandwidth connections and huge screens. The miniscule gray on gray type is especially stupid.
You mean the "consequences" that are the actions of others? That amounts to learning to be a victim and accepting it. The world's bad enough as it is; we don't need Internet Tough Guys to act as if they're the arbiters of social good. Fuck off with your authoritarian rhetoric.
That's why I come here - best Krembots on the web. I love these guys. Either here or The Independent.
Every page is so loaded down with script that my browser warns me that just displaying it is using too much in resources. You can't click on any link in the page until you have waited several minutes for it to stop thrashing around as ads huff and puff to assume their place in this mountain of script. After waiting this out some comment sections are usable, some are not.
Why am I not running an ad blocker? I did until every site I visited detected its presence and demanded that I stop running it. Are there no stealth ad blockers out there?
Especially on a product website.
You scroll through their products, click on one, then when you go back, you've lost your place.
I shouldn't have to open every link in a new tab just to keep my place in a list of things.
I'm using my TMobile free international data plan while I'm traveling through Europe. It's slow, for sure. Like, 2.5G data connection?
Slashdot won't even get past the adverts loading some of the time. The other times, when it does fully load, it can take over a minute to load the front page.
This is a webpage that's mostly text. :\
In constrast, BBCnews.com, a website filled with adverts and media, fully loads the front page in about 15-30 seconds.
I emailed the edmins about it a while ago, but got no response back.
I am tired of having to load megabytes of junk in order to load a single web page, and I think I am not alone.
So, as a responsible web developer, how must I do to keep website really lean and mean?
Is resizing the pictures (making the size as small as possible) without sacrificing picture quality still matter?
Is sticking to basic HTML without throwing in all kinds of unnecessary junk scripts still matter?
Are there other suggestions you can share?
Thanks !
The really funny thing is that Slashdot has an article complaining about this. Slashdot. Really. Slashdot is complaining about shit tons of "like me on social media" button images, retarded newsletter pushing and dumbass ads (yeah, calling them "deals" totally fools everyone into thinking they are not dumbass ads). Hey, Slashdot, try looking at a mirror.
We solved the human-computer interface by the 1990s.
The problem is that everyone insists that the old ideas are bad and only new ideas are good.
All of this bending over backwards to get JavaScript and the single-threaded DOM become "single screen applications" ignores that we already had all this almost thirty years ago.
Kriston
Webdev here.
I'm so on board with this guy and I so totally get his frustration. This is my personal daily plight. The problem is, ever since "Web Design" we've had to deal with the vast majority of people in our field claiming to be "Web Designers" but not knowing squat about how the web works, what it does and what it can't do and how it is done correctly. This shows at every corner ever since. We need some serious steps into professionalising our field. It has come quite a way, but we are not there yet.
People think that because it's nice and shiny and they can click on it that they can understand it. The problem is they don't. With web design and typography it is so easy for people to mistake the picture of a house with a house. After all, it looks the same, doesn't it? It frustrates the hell out of me talking to professional awarded web designers that after 20 years still blabbel utter non-sense about the 72dpi myth. I could hardly believe what I was hearing as I had this discussion last winter. That's because even the people handing out the awards don't know how the web works.
I listened to a tech talk from a blind buy the other week who demonstrated with a screen reader and a braile terminal how he navigates the web. He also explained how to build a semantically correct web. It was such an eye-opener and a brilliant demonstration of where the wheat seperates from countless metric tons of chaff. Div soup, semantic hell and broken websites left, right and center. If I were Kind I'd pass a law that everyone who builds websites has to demonstrate the viablity of them by navigating them blind, with a screen reader. The quality of the web would instantly improve by orders of magnitude.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Remember back when everyone was still using standard hard drives and you finally acquired your first SSD and booted up in a few seconds, and your computer felt more responsive than you ever remembered? Life was good. That game that used to take 2 minutes to load now loads up in seconds!
But what happens is soon everyone is using SSDs, including those of us doing development. Now when I write that code that accesses that hard drive way more than it really needs to I won't care, because SSDs are so fast! But oops, now everyone who's been writing code that access the hard drive hasn't cared so much about optimizing their calls either, and now our experience is slowly getting back to what it used to be.
Oh fuck, now I'm stuck using this computer that doesn't have an SSD. It's only got a shitty old platter hard drive. Sweet baby cheeses...why is everything so slow now??
This happens time and time again in IT. It's why Windows10 boots up in about the same time DOS used to boot up off a floppy. Well, you get the idea anyway.
May God have mercy on your soul if you're stuck on dial-up.
Perhaps people should worry far less about visual appearance and far more about functionality.
Wrong.
Professionals should care about and be able to handle both. Aesthetics isn't that difficult and if someone doesn't care how a website looks they still have some work to before they can call themselves a professional webdev. Not caring about aesthetics is just as bad as not caring about wether your stuff is processed client- or serverside. That doesn't mean they have to do screens all day, but it does mean they should know how it's done, to a certain degree. Just as any screendesigner should know what state, focus and context is and the difference between a value and a variable.
If someone can build a lean website that just can't help looking like shite they're part of the problem. The way smaller part, but still a part. The others are people who build neat screendesigns but wouldn't know a client from a server and think because they are OK in print they're good in web. Then there is that massive blob inbetween who are bad at both and still claim to be professionals.
Bottom line: Learn some basics about design, it's really not that difficult and knowing some general stuff about modern bauhaus minimalism shouldn't be to much of work for any decent developer.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is resizing the pictures (making the size as small as possible) without sacrificing picture quality still matter?
But then your magnificient web site will look drab on my 5 inch smartphone that is capable of 4k video!!
I paid for my GD 4k video capability on my mobile and I want you to give my my GD 4k video on my mobile!!
Eternal September.
You do realize that, at this point, MOST people using the internet have essentially no idea how ANY of this actually works, and couldn't figure out how to do script blocking even if you made them watch 4 hours of youtube videos explaining and demonstrating how to accomplish it?
The man has a point, which is, for the average user, none of the shit that has been shoehorned into, glued onto, and kludged under damn near every website on the net is actually useful, and generally actually detracts from the usability of the site.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Donâ(TM)t worry, all this will be fixed with this neat new binary protocol (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2
Use Lynx and rss feed readers. I kind of miss newsgroups, too.
JavaScript is not a markup language. HTML is. Many sites will not load or display without JavaScript. Model fail.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/12/22/2015231/average-web-page-approaches-1mb
And of course there's this great rant from 2015: The Website Obesity Crisis (Video). Money quote: "If current trends continue, it is very likely that by 2020 articles about web bloat are going to be 5MB in size or bigger."
That was my initial take on the phenomenon. These days, I'm less sure.
And what about these kindly shared JavaScript code libraries? Scooping up referrer information everywhere you go. Try blocking essential page functionality.
Sometimes I like that the pictures are too big. And by that I mean say a 500x300 or bigger picture that the site displays at 200x120, for example. Then I can right-click the picture, display it and zoom it, even if for something silly like checking out attractive people.
Fox News is the kind of sites that now blocks Europe, the tor network or both. Many others like forbes and I don't remember which.
All I get served is a 403 error or some bullshit very small page that gives me a long incident number. An excuse page about GDPR can be served. At worst I'm told something to make me feel I'm coming from a malicious network whatever that means.
Visit https://eu.usatoday.com/ and try not to blink, or you will miss page loading and rendering. They decided that getting rid of JS trackers is a better business decision than implementing all the consent gathering, required by EU law. Now USA Today page loads fast.
:wq
My advice to everyone is to keep up the good work.
AJAX is awweessoome!! Piecemeal loading of useful content, raking up shitloads of round trips is soooooo much better than wasting bandwidth. Your customers are worth it.
WAAYYY better to define site in terms of display widgets than wasting time organizing content semantically.
Treating web browsers as desktop application stack always yields amazing results.
Piling on abstraction layer over abstraction layer makes everything so much moar powerful. The moar you pile the bester the results!!!1!
Filling your site with cross site tracking "analytic" bugs is awesome. Your customers are worth it!! Installing stats package and parsing your own logs is for loooosers.
this site isnt for nerds, its for mainstream plebs.
Give us dark theme, like ARS, your so no a geek slashors.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I would like to suggest "GreaseMonkey" instead.
Although its not really ment for the "I have no idea what I'm doing, it should just work" crowd (it uses user-defined JS DOM scripting - even though you can download them), it can clean those links, and a lot more.
Like, in my case (I've got JS disabled in the browser) make googles "cache" links visible again.
.
Another plugin I rather value (probably even more than GreaseMonkey - though do not ask me to choose) is "RequestPolicy". It will (by default) block all third-party content (in one fell swoop it lowers data consumption/speeds up browsing as well as killing all spypixels and tracking stuff in general, (most) ads, auto-playing videos and music, fonts, etc).
Though its rather simple to tell it to allow certain contents though - on a requestor-to-target basis, globally, or something in between.
.
And a big pre (to me) is that neither of them have features that depend on a mothership, meaning that even when that (version of the) plugin is abandoned, it will keep functioning. :-)
This applies to everything in computing today. Yesterday I had to boot up our old client management PC, a 486DX2 with DOS and a matrix printer. The responsiveness of the application simply blew me away. Everything was instant. And when I wanted to print, the printer started to print instantly. In about five seconds a fully printed page was in my hands. Doing the same through a web app and then printing it on a desktop laser printer would have taken minutes.
Thanks to GDPR a low of websites are serving up the same content to Euopeans without all the bullshit attached. https://linustechtips.com/main...
I can't confirm if the CNN actually serves up pages that take 30 seconds to load, but I just clicked on the top most story about the wildfires and got a load time of 4 seconds with adblocking, and 6 seconds without adblocking.
We really shouldn't need adblockers, but we do, and this is precisely why. I don't mind a web site making a little cash from putting ads in front of my eyeballs -- it's exactly what publishers have always done with newspapers, magazines, and TV shows -- but when they waste my time or render a page unreadable then I'm done. Pages with delayed loading of ads or videos such that the text on the page is constantly moving after I have already loaded the page -- who ever thought that was a good idea? I understand why publishers scream about adblockers, but really, with many (and increasingly more) sites, if the publisher isn't going to build a reasonable web page then I'm either going to use an adblocker or I'm going to go elsewhere. Either way, the publisher won't make any ad dollars off me. I don't think I'm being unreasonable, but many publishers certainly seem to think I am.
Unfortunately, at work I don't really have much control over these things because my computer is locked down so we can only use software that has been vetted for security and privacy. Ironically, that means using Chrome with settings locked by the administrator to share maximum information with Google, no ability to install extensions like Privacy Badger and Adblock, and no ability even to install tools that make it easier to work with our approved office suite and project management tools. I don't think they realize just how much money they're paying me to fight with software that is supposed to be making me more efficient, but that's getting off-topic....
Not being able to edit is a joke.
Editing is for people who care what idiots on the internet think of them, really lifeless losers in that lot, like Reddit.
Just go to tass.com directly.
http://tass.com/
Ah cool I've just learnt the refugee camp near US occupied Al-Tanf will (eventually) be evacuated, they've been starving or living a crappy life. Like 70000 or 80000 people trapped in a desert camp between a closed border and random wandering armed groups.
This is the hateful stuff Russia has been doing all this current year, winning the war and saving countless thousands people like it's 1945. What a shame! Europe should buy more F35 and American LNG to counter this Russian threat against civilized western values.
-----------------------
Russian General Staff Chief has informed US side about situation in Syria in a letter
World
August 04, 15:52 UTC+3
The letter expressed disappointment that the US side has failed to "observe agreements on making the contacts’ content public only upon consultation of both sides"
Share
Chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, General of the Army Valery Gerasimov
Chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, General of the Army Valery Gerasimov
© Mikhail Metzel/TASS
MOSCOW, August 4. /TASS/. Russian Defense Ministry has confirmed the information that Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov had submitted a letter to Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, regarding the situation in Syria in July.
Earlier several news outlets reported that Gerasimov had informed the US’ top command authorities in a letter about Moscow’s proposal to cooperate on Syrian restoration.
"Chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, General of the Army Valery Gerasimov, replied to Joseph Dunford’s request following the Helsinki meeting on June 8 this year informing his colleague about measures being assumed by the Russian Federation together with the Syrian government to stabilize the situation in the Syrian Arab Republic," the ministry said on Saturday.
Meanwhile, it expressed disappointment that the American side has failed to "observe agreements on making the contacts’ content public only upon consultation of both sides."
"The existing communication channel between the Russian Armed Forces General Staff and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff makes it possible to prevent incidents between our armed forces and find mutually acceptable solutions taking into account the interests of both states. We expect the American side to assume necessary measures to prevent violations of mutual agreements in the future," the ministry noted.
The letter focused on Russia’s readiness to negotiate the issue of safely returning refugees from the Rukban camp located in the US-controlled Al-Tanf zone to their homes, with the Syrian authorities. According to the Defense Ministry, Moscow also proposed to negotiate the issues of humanitarian demining in Syria, including in Raqqa, dealing with other top-priority humanitarian problems for returning to peaceful life across Syria as soon as possible and neutralizing attempts by terrorists to recruit refugees.
That's why unpatched software is fine.
I'd say correcting one's own mistakes is and even better life lesson.
slashdot needs to fix their html code for displaying polls. https://imgur.com/a/HnX1CYV
Seriously, fuck you. I voted for Trump because of twerps with attitudes like yours. You are ignorant beyond belief and too dumb and especially too arrogant to ever realize it. This isn't an article about politics, it's about bad web design. The kind of bad web design people like you think is a good idea.
Nobody gives a crap what you think about President Trump in this or any other context. Grow up.
Back in the day of dialup, I built sites full of useful pages which loaded in 20 seconds or less. My target on home pages was about10 seconds. I watched as trash piled up, shook my head sadly, and walked away. The market wanted trash and I would NOT build that trash.
I still build fast pages, but only for myself. The market is utterly clueless.
Um, you edit before you click submit. Then you live with the consequences of your posts.
> Look at Google's initial success
Indeed.
Look at all the shit Yahoo kept adding while Google focused on doing one thing well. Functionality beats Form.
--
*facepalm*
Do not use JavaScript. If your experience can be done with css, do it. Otherwise... no JavaScript.
It is in a website owners interest to use up your computing resources, thus making it difficult or impossible for you to go to any other internet site.
The brick and mortar definition of a competitor: another business selling similar products or service that we do.
The internet definition of a competitor:
another website that is luring your eyeballs away from website.
I suspect that this actually went on for several years before it dawned on somebody that loading crap on an end-users kept their eyeballs away from competitors. Unless I'm the first.
That's not news, the websites have been getting fatter and fatter for a very long time now. Maciej Ceglowski calls that "the website obesity crisis", and he gave a very good talk about this problem. Goes into a bit more detail than TFA. The text version is available here: http://idlewords.com/talks/web....
Don't get me wrong. I loath Javascript. And apparently it is quite difficult to write and test because it seems often to work very badly.
On the bright side, I think web scripting is probably doomed because its always going to be a security problem. Eventually --- maybe in 5 or 10 years -- folks will work that out.
BUT, there are capabilities that are needed for handling interactive maps, message editing, etc that presumably will need to be built into browsers and/or OSes before downloadable scripts can be consigned to the dustbin of history.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Then there are the background videos that play.
For instance one Australian university (University of Tasmania), has a page load time of 2.66seconds according to pingdom for their homepage.
However the page load size is 17.2MB because of a 13.6MB background banner video, about 3MB worth of images, and a bunch of smaller things.
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
This is how you design practical websites without being an asshole "artist" about it.
No it isn't. If you're having difficulty with JS, you don't really understand JS.
AdBlock Plus and ScriptBlock for da win!
So it's not at all about whether or not the title is correct, but rather it's all about you. Thanks for sharing.
Foxnews 9 secs till autoplay video finishes loading
And I also get The Hill at around 9 secs
Yeah, I resent that too.
Now I can't post some bullshit-but-provocative statement, wait until some poor sod replies to it, and than edit my origional message such that the sod seems to be a moron, not understanding even a single sylabelle of what I said.
Yeah, I rather resent that the moderators have blocked me from trolling people that way.
/s
Also imagine someone who does not like how the thread progresses, and decides to just erase all his comments in it ... Can you imagine whats than left and how usable it still will be ?
And yes, I've seen both of the above happen.
Indeed. Not being able to edit or delete posts is a big plus that has helped Slashdot survive for as long as it has.
You can always reference and quote a post knowing that what you referenced and quoted won't change under your feet.
Instead, some people here want to introduce redactionism? Either they really haven't thought this through, are incapable of doing so, or don't care. In either case, they are the problem, not the commenting system.
That said, it would be nice to get a WARNING after the submit, if there are unmatched tags (especially quote and blockquote), requiring a second confirmation in those particular cases.
But editing? No, that is what makes Slashdot special enough to warrant its life. Make it like other sites catering to the lying and the stupid, and it will perish.
The typical Amazon product page is 12M, including 1M of css and 3M of javascript. The html for the page is 1M.
Back to simple, clean, and maybe people would learn to read again ..
Part of the problem is with sheer size of content, another is scaling, yet another is distributed content.
My company's main web presence takes 20s to load even with fast connections. We have an enormous (and useless) video that plays and requires a 60MB download. We have graphics and other content sourced for half a dozen or more different sources. When the page loads you see dozens/hundreds of warnings/errors in the console.
Our VP of marketing loves it thought because on our gigabit connection it loads fast and she has no idea about the rickety underpinnings.
The problem is that quality designs require quality developers. Most businesses aren't looking to pay that much, or those that do are looking for the person to multitask to non front end.
It's all a series of compromises, it's just a shame we don't compromise more toward simplicity.
My employer opened a new line of business and did a new website using magento. That decision was resume programming by one of our developers. It certainly didn't do the company any good. The guy who made that decision could not get the thing done, but took his new experience and got a new job. Mission accomplished.
Completing the thing was then farmed out. It took another four months to launch. That only happened because someone internal helped the external contractor. It's been a couple more months and that internal developer still doesn't know magento well, the site still runs like ass, and it's been farmed out to another company to fix it.
I knew this whole thing was folly when I learned early on that the way to get acceptable performance out of magento was to run two web servers, one external facing and one serving content to the other web server, in order to implement caching. You gotta be kidding. This is in addition to the many different things magento apparently does on its own to cache shit. And then there's something called redis, whatever that is. I guess we have to get that working, too.
And a content delivery network. We apparently need one of those, too.
Our home page has a megabyte of large images. You'd think that would be the bulk of the size, but it's not. It is seven megabytes, most of it javascript and style sheets. There's one style sheet alone that is 1.5M. For a fucking page with images, a slideshow, clickabe stuff and a menu.
The order form pages are twenty fucking megabytes.
And the marketing firm we hired, and the marketing contractor we hired when they didn't deliver? They want all the trackers. All of them. They want to analyze the shit out of the six customers they've managed to find us. The six customers who have managed to order something from our piece of shit website.
In the time it has taken to launch this thing, and still not get it working acceptably, I could have coded the damned thing from scratch, without a "framework", and we'd have a new platform to move the existing business to. I've promised the boss a 99% reduction in non-image page sizes, three second load times including network latency even if he chooses to host the thing in Butfuck, Saskatchewan, like the new site. But I haven't padded my resume with obviously ridiculous crap like the contractor who is now "fixing" the piece of shit, so he's not listening, and my only recourse is the inevitable "I told you so." If we even survive this.
Our website won't work without JavaScript. Why? Not because it's needed for advertisements, tracking, or any of that bullshit. It because we can create a very clean interface for searching our stock without having refresh the whole page (or even an iframe). The page queries a web service that return JSON which is far smaller that a frame of markup will ever be.
For example, if you want to search by a make and model of a product, without JavaScript you'd have to select the make, click submit, wait for the page to redraw. Select the model, click submit and wait for the page to redraw. Want to apply another filter? Select and submit, etc. With JavaScript you can select the make and the models are reloaded, allowed with any related filters.
I hate slow websites, and making ours fast has been a priority, but telling people to disable JavaScript will never work because the vast majority of interaction websites require it. You might as well tell people to use lynx...
I agree and am confused about why you haven't been modded up more.
-- Cheers!
You're so right. And I miss John Katz.
-- Cheers!
Who farted?
Heh...does anyone on Slashdot seriously run without at least at least script blocking in place?
Define script blocking. Running ublock Origin which also blocks a set of tracking scripts? Definitely. Running the equivalent of Noscript and having to finely whitelist every script on every website? Fuck no, my time is more valuable than that.
You javascript guys remind me of the loyal Americans that firmly believed in the 1970s and 1980s that America was building the finest cars in the world. The cars themselves had barely changed since 1949. Huge, gas guzzling monstrosities, with the handling characteristics of a buckboard and a typical showroom to scrapyard lifetime of six years. On top of which, the build quality was, if anything, worse than it was two or three decades earlier. When consumers finally realized that the product was awful, they fled en masse to products from overseas. It took government intervention and the 1984 Ford Taurus/Sable sedan to sort of save the US automotive industry for a couple of decades..
The issue is not my understanding of javascript mate. It's the crummy products you folks are producing.
Even if javascript wasn't beyond the capabilities of its practicioners, I think it's likely doomed in the long run because it seems impossible to prevent malicious any_sort_of_script from compromising users computers and there seems to be no way to keep nasty scripts out of the web ecosystem other than to refuse to run scripts.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Ars Technica won't show story comments when I click on a link with an old (2012) Safari browser on my ipad -- it's just a link to expand out comments - why have it, or if they need it, why can't they make something as simple as a link work with a relatively modern web browser?
I don't enjoy programming so much as having my programs work. Anything that makes that more difficult irks me. I hate abstraction layers for the most part. Coding standards are usually over generalized best practice. And the hideous nonsense we perpetrate in the name of reusability, extensibility, and maintainability makes me nauseus. Instead, "you aren't going to need it", "rewrite don't reuse", and " don't abstract what you don't understand".
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
So I pull up the Noscript menu and two seconds later I've permanently whitelisted your website. Problem solved.
The market has spoken faggot.
People want javascript sites, and if you're going to use javascript, might as well be javascript ONLY.
No separate site for the 0.01% autistic special snowflakes such as yourself.
Well said, and spot-on.
Not being able to edit is quaint, but it makes Slashdot feel like AOL.
There may be other discussion sites on the web that don't let you edit comments, but I'm not aware of any.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
"I voted against my class interests to own the liburals. Epic style."
Shut up you mouth breathing retard. Just kill yourself.
Two-party democracy is shit at the best of times, but you deserve all the pain that's coming to you. Fucking tool.
Most media websites including Slashdot can be read just fine with JS off. I installed a JS switcher plug-in in my FF toolbar and keep it off by default. Better security and gets rid of ads too. Sometimes less is more.
I use an external pfSense firewall running Snort and pfBlocker. I also run Privoxy locally with many blocking entries. Unfortunately, most people don't have the knowledge to set up such systems.
millions of sites, times 2 seconds each. your time is apparently without value. likely your life is as well.
This is a hosts file I use to avoid some bad stuff: https://someonewhocares.org/ho...
Much thanks to Dan Pollock and others for creating and maintaining it!
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
But that's fine. As a user everyone would prefer to visit an amateur site. "Professional" is almost a bad word on the web, because on average, that's the least friendly part of the web.
That isn't to say an amateur website should look bad, but if its maker completely ignores things like fonts, colors, etc, it's likely to look just fine, or at least highly above average.
Looking not-bad and loading quickly, is vastly more important than looking good. More often than not, the work put into what lots of people call "design" has negative value. That's because in real life, "design" isn't really about appearance; it's about how-things-work, and fonts are the 134th thing on the list, not the 2nd thing on the list. And if you think about fonts before headlines, hierarchies, and organization, your website is probably going to suck. Oh, you might step back and say "pretty!" but if you think in terms what you would want to see and experience, a page that doesn't have even a drop of CSS or javascript is something you would almost certainly prefer.
Amateurs don't have to think about what marketing wants, analytics, ad revenue, etc and users don't care about that stuff either. Professionals do, and that's usually going to put their websites' quality at a disadvantage.
I've been doing front end web development for 20 years, and while careful performance optimizations can deliver sub-second page loads I've often seen this kind of work undone by the kinds of crap that gets added in production deployments, usually done through something like google tag manager which serves to inject other javascript into a page as administered through a google-provided admin portal. You end up with multiple analytics packages, all of the trackers, facebook's universe of godless crap (and twitter's), Optimizely being employed as a CMS of last resort, and the worst offender I've ever seen: Zendesk's customer service chat client. Many of these also package their own jquery or even react framework-- and not from a CDN, where it might have been cached-- and many don't even do users the courtesy of waiting until after the DOM content is ready to start loading. So you end up loading 3 or 4 jquery scripts, plus React for a tiny chat widget, and on top of it many organizations lose track of how much stuff they are even loading.
Also, slow page speed drives down Google page rank which drives up advertising cost-per-click.
I agree on the value of uMatrix. Right now, for example, it is blocking 14 items from Slashdot. I can't imagine browsing the web without it or something similar.
When I sometimes see people browse the web without it I am a bit shocked at what most web pages look like. Also, once I posted a link to a reasonable site without knowing that there was advertising-supplied "your computer has been infected" junk there -- because I usually just don't see junk like that.
For personal web surfing, I mostly use a not-too-fast Chromebook (running GalliumOS) with only 4GB RAM -- but I can have dozens or sometimes even hundreds of tabs open without much slow down (usually) -- because most of the JavaScript is selectively blocked. Contrast that with comments by people who say their Chromebook (or other machine) slows down when only a few tabs are open.
The risk though is that uMatrix can in theory mess with any site or with your computer. This is the sort of thing that should be baked into every browser -- and continually undergo stringent review. But it is not built-in because -- even with Firefox -- there are conflicts of interests with how browser vendors make their money via either advertising or deals with advertisers.
A plus for me is that -- as a JavaScript/TypeScript UI developer mostly right now -- looking at what JavaScript sites load can be educational. But I can see how for the average web user that is mostly going to be more of a potentially confusing chore -- although a chore still worth it for everyone IMHO.
I don't use uBlock origin -- maybe I should? But I have found a hosts file that blocks questionable sites helps a lot (see my previous post here e.g. https://someonewhocares.org/ho... ).
Tangentially, here is a shout out for using Mithril.js/HyperScript plus Tachyons.css for web UI developers who want to make low-footprint quick-to-load-and-run sites that are also easy to refactor.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Javascript is a horrible software development tool. It was created for people with poor coding skills who find static type checking to be too difficult. Business people have decided on this standard, not the industry, because they can hire two JavaScript monkeys instead of one software engineer and to them thats better. They donâ(TM)t care since they only pay for a small amount of the bandwidth required to present their site, the consumer pays for all the thirdparty crap they have to download to view that site.
I just recently had to take ownership of a project that done entirely in Angular. What a bunch of garbage. Angular is what you get when you take the Dunning-Kruger effect and smash it together with severe autism. Its only purpose is to vomit out 10-20 times as much code as is necessary to display content while making the result completely unmaintainable. It makes up its own cult-like terminology and never clearly defines its own constructs. There are these things called "factories", "services", and "providers", which all seem to do exactly the same thing, no less in 30-40 lines of code at minimum where 2 or 3 would suffice in raw JS. A StackOverflow page attempting to explain the difference between these three constructs runs to several pages, and might be the longest response I've ever seen on that site (not to mention that one responder indicated that when forced to use Angular he implemented everything three times using "factories" "services" and "providers" just to prove there was no difference between them).
In short, Angular is garbage, and if anyone ever suggests using it, fire them immediately and hire a new web developer who understands how software works, rather than a "full stack architect barista" or whatever they call themselves now.
I know this doesn't fix the problem aside from personal usage, but if everyone just Adblocked the living hell out of everything, they would reach the point I'm at where nearly every third party script/addon/bullshit is gone. You curate your own blacklist over the years, it becomes your own sort of continually growing monument to bullshit nontolerance.
...IS THE FUCKING ASSHAT THAT DECIDED INFINITE SCROLL WAS A GOOD IDEA!!!!!@#@!#@!#@!
BOOKS replaced SCROLLS long the fuck ago. A certain amount of scrolling on a website of course is necessary; but I'd much rather click a link to page 542 than have to scroll down for an hour to get to it...
But you overlook the biggest improvement American car manufacturers came up with: tail fins! (which btw I see on a lot of websites...not literal tail fins, but the functional equivalents)
For the record, every car I've ever bought was foreign (counting the Chevy LUV, which was really a re-branded Isuzu). The only really bad foreign car was a 1970-something Fiat 128 SL. Nice looking, nice driving when it was working, but less dependable than an American car, if that were possible.
No. The example is a special case. Nobody browses millions of sites that truly need ajax for all of their content.
No, 2 seconds is only for shit that won't work without scripting. Also, this only has to be done once per site. In fact, faster site loading and a lack of pop-ups and such means that time is saved instead of wasted. And no, most people don't browse "millions of sites."
In Firefox, set media.autoplay.enabled to false. If you do want a video to play (youtube, say), you may need to click on it (at least once) before the browser gives up and tells you the video is broken. Once it does that, I've had to reload the page in order to get the video player to respond.
I might have been overzealous in my statements to get a reaction. I do think copy and paste can be the beat form of reuse for domain specific stuff that is "just different enough" from an existing bit of code that generalizing it gets ugly. I have seen more instances of code that was made common for reuse that subsequently became less or un usable by any of its users than I have seen of the "oh crap I only fixed that bug in the other spot" problem. I prefer paraphrase to copy and paste as a form of reuse anyway. And then in so many instances I have seen people reuse code but they decided to create a wrapper to abstract away the lack of understanding they had, unknowing that there were already three such layers created for exactly the same reason.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Page taking forever to load? Annoying autoplay videos? Newsletter beg? Click the back button. If enough of us do this, the designers will eventually get the hint.
I run a small information website (not further identified) which has no bullshit. My guiding principle has been to present only the content without unnecessary embellishment. So, I have ...
no cookies,
no pop-ups,
no plug-ins,
no Flash,
no scripts of any kind except for a visit counter and a script to run the form on the Contact page,
no requests to sign up, register, or subscribe,
no collection of information about your location,
no frames,
no applets,
no animations,
no auto-start videos, and
no advertisements, except for links to and a few logos from organizations that I support or of which I am a dues-paying member.
Someone should start a public black-list of sites that have too many scripts or too much non-content "stuff". I could name a few sites to add to the list.
John Katz was/is a pedophile.
It only took 6 seconds for the independent to load. Fancy.
Fuck Russia, we got our own problems. They can deal with their own shit.
Stop spamming you asshole retard.
You voted for Trump because of some whiny millennials? Not because of any particular parties' stance or issue? Way to go! So intelligent! At least admit to being deceived by Trump or perhaps confused by all the russian misinformation.
Don't take this the wrong way. I can instantly tell you are half my age. Simply because you missed the last twenty years of people, including myself, wrongly deducing that javascript would go away. It will never go away. It is the un-treatable gonorrhea of the software profession. And the more you apply reason the f_cking worse this will get. It's like there are dark forces at work. None of this will stop. Eventually I'll push around a hotdog cart smiling and waving at cars. Reduced to a drooling idiot. But at least it will all be over. For me at least.
Any sane person would look at the kludge of bubblegum and bandaids that is the web stack and think, 'Holy Sh_t this cannot continue. If software engineering looked like this when I was a teenager I never would have gone into the field. This cannot continue.' But they'd be wrong. Because no matter how bloated and disgusting it gets we can always make it worse. Just look at angular. Now you have a compiler to compile to incomprehensible piles of javascript. Hell it has a complete tool chain all to itself.
But why stop there? What? You think we can't make the app domain more complicated you fool? We'll containerize everything. Use micro frameworks. Dockerize that mothrfker. Run the app over 30 mini virtual machines with their own stacks.
And you keep waiting for the guy who writes the checks to call bullh_t. It'll never happen. I'll be dead first.
Dear JEALOUS "Lil' Jowie" the "ne'er-do-well" do-nothing: I don't OBEY a pusscake like YOU that STALKS ME via UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous offtopic trollings... got it?
* I hope so (but sincerely wonder if an IMBECILE like yourself can read @ all to understand it).
APK
P.S.=> Of course, IF you'd like to MEET ME IN PERSON & TRY MAKE ME OBEY YOU? You're more than WELCOME to try, straight to my face, man to man (so I can put you in the morgue, you chicken dick little cocksucking motherfucker)... apk
From my 15+ years of Web App/ SaaS experience I can tell you the most common problems are loading things externally for no good reason and not compressing white space. 99% of the time that speeds up your site significantly.
The normal websites the following is true with the exceptions of CDN's only.
There are NO reasons to load css files from anywhere but your own servers
There are NO reasons to load jquery/core javascript files from anywhere but your own servers
There are NO reasons to load image files from anywhere but your own servers on that domain
When you get to CNN's level... that have an insane amount of media (images, videos etc) and that just can't work that way... however they should only be loading them from CDNs of some kind that handle all that stuff behind the scenes. CNN's website is nightmare right up until you add AdBlock... then suddenly it loads in 1.3 seconds. That should tell you the problems right there.
Lets not talk about Wordpress because that's chuck full of "How not to do things" but it's the only functional one that can do all it can without 40 hours of training (I'm looking at you Drupal and Joomla!).
It's just another example of the developing complexity collapse.
E Proelio Veritas.
But mods can edit their posts. This article used to say 'garbarge', now it says 'garbage'. Mods can hide their mistakes, so should we.
Work for it little bitch (for once in your WASTED do-nothing life) & you're so STUPID - I'm EASY to find (I use my real name unlike a pussy in you) & have been "doxxed" MANY times on /. by other do-nothing "ne'er-do-wells" like you (big deal - I severely DOUBT you'd even survive on the way to my home where a pusscake like YOU would get eaten alive & assraped on the way, lol).
* SEE SUBJECT: OF COURSE WORK's A FOREIGN CONCEPT TO YOUR KIND THAT HIDES BEHIND MASKS ANTIFA BOY, lol... welfare's MORE your style & being an ANONYMOUS weasel!
APK
P.S.=> You're a ZERO & a STALKER that HIDES from UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous, ya Pussy... apk
"This is the hateful stuff Russia has been doing all this current year, winning the war" for a murderous tyrant against his own people because he can't win without foreign help being so hated by the majority of his countrymen.
Warning. APK's claims are exaggerations and deliberately misleading.
Alex's 'software' does nothing more than download, merge and sort lists provided by 3rd parties. Those 3rd parties acknowledge that using a hostfile, alone, is insufficient for security.
Alex's 'software' must be run, manually, before any use of the internet. Whatever savings you make in shaving milliseconds off querying cache vs hosts is lost in the _minutes_ that this process adds to your use.
Alex refuses to acknowledge that his 'solution' is a black list - dead last in terms of security. He seems to have no knowledge or ability to discuss security concepts like 'least access' and his criticisms of whitelisting comes down to 'increased management' (while ignoring that his toll requires as much or more). He is unable to assess risk in a useful or meaningful fashion.
It's clear that his skills, knowledge and outlook ossified some time in the 90s. His arguments and values represent a time when a single machine, with limited resources was used to connect to an internet with limited and only partially ineffective tools.
Many of the claims of support come from selective quotations from users and/or linking to articles that contain the words 'host file'. He still thinks that the Chinese proposal to back up DNS using something like a host file bears some similarity to blocking the domains of bad actors on a personal machine. He used to claim Malwarebytes recommended him, until it was pointed out that the two other host file management tools available were described as 'useful, whereas his was not.
APK. Not useful. Not relevant. Dangerously incomplete
Have a dedicated client and stream it to users internally or over the internet (Citrix). Data fat client locally = fast client. Best approach for internal stuff in my opinion. Have a dedicated API so others can access as needed.
Screw bells and whistles, I can't say how many hours I've messed around with CSS just to get things to look right (and Angular Material - thanks for the new tags for centering things, very much unappreciated, we already had that wheel).
I'm all for the ability to customize, but at this point web front webs are worse that GOTO statements. Loss of UI compile time binding (I know, MVC...) is a big step back to me, NG doesn't notice a misspelling (VB6 handled this better).
Anyway, older guy who finds "modern" web development way too complicated for the results. What's that, my single value container component has 400 lines of code (populate, validate, etc.) and we can't generate much of it? number 0 === null in Typescript, that makes sense. Truthy - fuck that?
I guess we now know the answer to Do Businesses Really Need to Hire CS Majors?"
See subject: A small part of what my program does is that & it also speeds you up locally vs. slower DNS (that goes down & is INSECURE due to redirect poisoning which hosts cure too).
I NEVER say "hosts do all" (NOTHING does)!
I say hosts do MORE for LESS vs. ANY other SINGLE 'solution' SLOWING you full of SECURITY issues due to complexity (vs. hosts simplicity & ease of use) + "Bolt on 'MoAr'" ILLOGIC-LOGIC vs. hosts NATIVE power
I always SAY hosts is a BLACK LIST - What can't touch you & you can't touch can't hurt you!
Steven Burn Malwarebytes' employee SAYS my work is what he recommends He says same of INFERIOR Windows only hostsman too (& I'm multitplatform + provide reverse DNS faster resolution VIA MY OWN CODE, not SQLite hostman uses & doesn't DO that resolution, only mine does)).
APK
P.S.=> What's CLEAR here is you = ALL TALK & JEALOUS "Lil' Jowie" & others like + use my work (not yours) https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... ... apk
I see apk tossed your lies into the bin https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... so what does your software do better than his.
Got it you are the pussycake you claim everyone else is.
APK the weak scared little keyboard warrior, can't defend his work, afraid to defend himself.
I don't think many are claiming JavaScript is a good languageâ"its just what we have to work with on the web. Thankfully there are higher-level languages like Typescript that can transpile, but until browsers are fully on board with a different solution, we're stuck with JS.
Every site I've seen since about mid-2015 has been a clone of Buzzfeed to some non-zero degree. Ugh.
Mass immigration is only in business owners' economic interests.
I think you're confusing clients and users
Antifa bitch, in case you didn't notice? You're the one HIDING behind UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts you projecting little weasel bitch!
* You are a pussy...
APK
P.S.=> ... & not only do YOU know it - everyone else reading now does too (not that THAT bothers you - you already KNOW IT about yourself, hence you hiding - you KNOW you're shit)... apk
The issue is not my understanding of javascript mate. It's the crummy products you folks are producing.
This right here is the problem
You js muppets have no business writing frameworks. It's like the blind leading the blind.
At most I'd say you should be writing small stand alone libraries that can be added to an existing code base and just as easily removed
Some of you are already going down the rabbit hole of grunt, webpack etc just at the thought of "easy to add/remove libs" without considering how much time you're wasting with some over engineered shit, just so you can avoid using a fucking script tag
I'm usually shaking my head in disappointment when someone calls themselves a "javascript engineer".
No actual engineering is happening when you js asshats are involved
Seriously, what do people expect from CNN?
CNN produces propaganda and they're horrible at it, meaning everyone with half a brain can detect it.
Good propaganda and actual reporting are terribly difficult to tell apart - CNN on the other hand simply screams about Orange Man Bad all day long and that kind of gives it away.
But he's right.. a lot of websites load much MUCH slower on modern browsers and highspeed connections than (not even) 10 years ago, and the information it shows hasn't changed. So a lot of garbage is used in designing these modern websites. A lot of people who call themselves webdevelopers aren't real webdevelopers, if their WYSIWYG editor doesn't show it correctly, they don't know how to fix it, and only know the components that come with it, but real "HTML 5" is not something they know.
I'll admit it - I read the evil purveyors of fake news. But I do so less and less often because it requires a full powered PC these days. The pages render largely blank, readable text is a moving target constantly resizing and moving content around,, and on my iPad Mini sometimes fails to load text beyond the first paragraph. Other websites are becoming the same way. Even my few years old quad-core i7 struggles to load a website. How much horsepower do I need to read the news? (haha -- maybe I need a virtual PC to read fake news?!! :-D )
But I have to wonder if it isn't the platform used to generate/publish the website. It can't be "just the ads" --- CNN has decided that every article needs Video whether the video belongs to the article. And the video needs to auto-play to some other video. Poor design choices. I'm usually done reading the page before the video loads.
And with other sites becoming just as slow - could it be "Angular" or whatever framework is used these days? So much dynamic javascript - javascript is a pig (sorry, I think it needs a compiler). The web wants "Flash" like features but we're all using low-powered mobile devices. I think there's conflict.
I am APK the great "LORD of HOSTS", a.k.a. AlecStaar or Alexander Peter Kowalski.
See subject & APK Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux h t t p : / / I . a m . a . f u c k i n g / a s s h o l e . r e t a r d . z i p (remove spaces between characters & download).
I am the godlike creator of various GUI front-ends for other people's configuration files.
Watch as I claim I win every argument when in reality I know I lost but that won't stop me from proclaiming my victory.
When presented with facts I rebut them with wild speculations, false support, and out of context quotes
All of my accomplishments revolve around me being proven to be an annoying spamming asshole
See me be proud of my inability to be a functional adult
Bask in my debilitating mental illness
Hear me tell stories about me living large drinking miller lite in my ramshackle duplex with a roommate at age 54.
Watch me spew some word salad because I can't string 2 words together in a coherent manner.
I just don't understand why every site I post on everyone makes fun of me, it can't be because I am a shit stick but instead because they are all Ne'er-do-well SOYboy Jealous JOWIEs.
Witness my descent into madness
APK
APK Hosts File Engine trims it down shearing away ads + scripts faster vs. any other method APK Hosts File Engine 2.0++ 64-bit for Linux h t t p : / / a p k . i t - m a t e . c o . u k / A P K H o s t s F i l e E n g i n e F o r L i n u x . z i p OR APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-1 32/64-bit for Windows https://www.google.com/search?...
For Windows & Linux + BSD variants keeping you SAFER & FASTER online as well as more reliably connected (vs. DNS redirect poisoning security issues OR being down) + more anonymous (vs. script tracking + DNS request log tracking too).
* Enjoy...
APK
P.S.=> ... & accept NO substitutes for the best (see above)... apk
See my subject & answer that: & Why do you also STALK me by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts as well? AFRAID to stand behind your lies??
* THIS I have to hear, lol - it WILL truly be a classic I'm sure!
(CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE SUDDENLY? You wouldn't answer LAST TIME I ASKED IT + YOU DOWNMOD "HID" IT (the sure sign of YOUR total SELF-defeat) https://it.slashdot.org/commen... )
Plus, since you say I'm the "Lord of Hosts"? My "portrait & themesong" https://www.youtube.com/watch?... so SATAN, get thee behind me.
APK
P.S.=> Grow up you obsessed loon who not only IMPERSONATES me but also STALKS me by UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts constantly... apk
Go ahead, please build a Javascript free website that has all the modern functionality people expects from websites nowadays.
I'll wait.
Browsing 1 million sites at the rate of 1 per second would take 11 and a half days. No breaks for eating, sleeping, or toileting.
A more reasonable rate (1 per second? LOL! Takes more time to load the tracking .js than that) would be 1 per minute, limited to half time (so you can go home and sleep between relentless site-visiting). Still no weekends.
Now you're up to 4 years of work just to hit 1 million websites.
Personally, I probably visit a "top 10" list multiple times per day, getting up to top 20 multiple times per week, and almost everything outside of my top 25 list is crap I've visited once or twice.
It's also the huge hero images that load at the top of the page,
especially if they're frickin hero videos or carousels!!
Right?! Browsing 2 million sites at a rate of 1 per 30 seconds would take you nearly 4 years at 12 hours of browsing every day, no vacations.
Relax, he is just another one of the people on this site who do not like coders, web developers, javascript developers or any of those three. God help you if you are all 3 like me.
Quite frankly /. and some businesses in general treat web developers and javascript coders like shit. It is entirely undeserved, and can be safely ignored.
These people don't like us because we are increasingly coming for their jobs and their binary languages that they have been in love with since they were children. Thing is, we are just trying to put in a hard days work like any other fella out there doing the grind of life. They can shove their irrational hatred right up their over entitled arses.
This is why I'm using uMatrix with Waterfox. The "modern" web has gone out of control, and you need to filter the crap out of it, starting with tracking, ads, and of course not needed junk like fonts or rogue scripts mining Monero or whatnot.
uMatrix handles everything beautifully, and remembers per site settings.
Sometimes my internet degrades so much that i have needed the old fashioned Netscape block image button, for that i got image-block, another extension that has saved when every little byte counts.
Also Waterfox with the classic theme restorer is an unbeatable combo for a decent classic UI.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Its CNN... lol
The web is not a desktop and adding interactivity towards making html/JS behave like desktop applications is slow, much more costly and soon to break.
How many web applications will I have to write with a user requested "Excel like spreadsheet in the browser" as a core user feature? How many hundreds of hours are spent on gold plating on top of core functionality?
Hey, It'll take me 2 weeks to develop feature X; please get the business user manager signature authority to sign off on a PO for $10,000.00" is what is needed to prevent it.
I never realized how much it helps, but not being able to edit helps keep the site civil. You can neither go back and make your post more sarcastic, nor write whatever you feel like at the moment, knowing you can change it later.
But as to submission issues, yes! I would love it if changing the text preferences (like enabling/disabling HTML mode) did not wipe out all the text you wrote. (Ha, maybe unexpectedly deleting posts is a technique to reduce the length of arguments.)
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
You're the one HIDING & STALKING me as UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous! Do you even HAVE a home (as I do fully paid off) or do you live under a bridge like the troll you are?
Nothing to show for yourself either in the way of accomplishment in computing either (prove otherwise - oh, that's right - you CAN'T when you don't have a damn thing to show like you).
* You're a JEALOUS "Lil' Jowie" loser that STALKS me via UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts since you are AFRAID of me, no questions asked.
APK
P.S.=> Your JEALOUS is SHOWING "Lil' Jowie" but nothing else to show for yourself @ all - hahahaha... apk
You HIDE behind UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous "ANTIFA" & NO denying it - I don't threaten vs. a NOBODY in you STALKING me constantly you punk.
APK
P.S.=> I can also PROVE registered /.ers DISGREE w/ your JEALOUS "Lil' Jowie" do-NOTHING zero you are bullshit (want more? Ask - I've DOZENS more like these YOU NEVER WILL, lol) https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... because you're a LOSER "ne'er-do-well" TALKER & nothing more hahahaha (& you NOT only KNOW it, you PROVE it constantly always LOSING (especially vs. me))... apk
This is no different than MS Windows or GNOME.
I believe there used to be a saying a thousand years ago when I was just a wee lad: What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
This is all exactly representative of mental health in the modern world. Justify things based on what you want instead of reality and the crud just keeps building until it just doesn't work anymore. It is a good thing that humans have limited lifespans so we can justify the mental illness by saying that they were gonna die anyways so we do not have to reflect on what caused the problems.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
> BUT, there are capabilities that are needed for handling interactive maps, message editing, etc that presumably will need to be built into browsers and/or OSes before downloadable scripts can be consigned to the dustbin of history.
There used to be a time when people wrote applications. If you want something like Google Maps, there's no reason you can't just download it and have it exist outside of a web browser. The same goes for Netflix, YouTube, etc. The main problem is that people have forgotten that the internet exists outside of web browsers.
Also a factor is that OSs make no distinction between permissions that a user has and permissions that any application should have, leading to users avoiding downloads, as javascript in their web browser is their only option for running software without that software being allowed to do everything on their computer that they're allowed to do.
Like I said to each his own. My web browsing experience isn't optimal for you, yours isn't optimal for me.
Content filtering isn't the same level of protection as something like NoScript, but maybe you run on Linux or in a disposable VM making that the right approach for you.
I suspect that 30+ second load mentioned takes considerably less on your system also though? :-)
--- Mercutio was right.
Like...the New York Times? The only way to ensure that ever response relates to what was originally written, is exactly that. Which is why Slashdot ASKS ....VERY TIME...to review what you've written and make sure that it says what you want to say. Slashdot is like spoken word. You cannot go back in time and change your words. It's like speech. Those that don't get it, either never reflected on it, or fail the implications of changing your speech after the fact. It is also why newspapers actually correct only very minor error and provide a log of changes / errata in every single article with changes. In here, doing that would require editorial review, and since it's user opinions, that's why you can't edit.
unfinished: (adj.)
I suspect that 30+ second load mentioned takes considerably less on your system also though? :-)
Indeed. Which was my point. Are you talking about script blocking with white list, or just adding some kind of basic protection like the ublock plugin that leaves most of the internet otherwise functional yet many tracking systems in place.
So each to his own sure, but you also asked "does anyone on slashdot seriously...." If you're talking about basic protections then the answer is no. If you're talking about white list and script management the answer is not only certainly, it would be "predominantly".
You could do the right thing and use JS as it was intended: to "upgrade" parts of a site for those that want it. If you really would care about your users, you wouldn't force a big blob of JS on them, knowing full well that having JS enabled in the wild web is an insane security risk. You can do the correct way to deal with the web as a default, and apply your "modern" take on it if the user happens to have JS enabled. Now, suddenly everyone can use your site, and people can opt to enable the automatic downloading of malware/use the "faster" version.
Forcing JS as a requirement around the web is by far the worst thing that has happened in web development in recent years. JS is a terrible language by any standard, and JS is most often used to serve malware and harm user privacy. It should *not* be enabled by default, and you should not make it a requirement to use a website in *any* circumstance.