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."

Comments

Take back control

[nmb3000]

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.

Re:The problem is the content authors.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good-looking design and functionality aren't mutually exclusive.

That said, if you need much more than out-of-the box HTML5 and CSS3 (and an occasional SVG) to make your application look good- you suck at design.

I'm shocked at how many developers (both the 'fartists' you describe and grognardian 'senior' devs) have no clue what the browser gives them for free, basically.

The majority of web developer interviews I've been on almost entirely consist of Javascript algorithm efficiency and cleverness, and almost zero on baseline HTML5 spec.

Re:Larger files aren't a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I will keep no adblocker, noscript, ghostery, etc tuned up to block this BS.

The Ghostery plugin actually stalks you. Switch to Privacy Badger.

Re:Slashdot can't even encode characters correctly

[Narcocide]

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?

Amen! Amen! Amen, Brother!

[Qbertino]

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.

Get rid of trackers and see

[zdzichu]

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.

Re:The problem is the content authors.

[vtcodger]

"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."

The wretched hive of scum and infamy that is the modern Internet seems slowly to be evolving toward near total unusability. I have to confess that some of what is going on seems almost inexplicable. For example, Amazon.com, which used to be relentlessly consumer oriented has a web site that is becoming so slow and unresponsive in every browser I try as to be virtually unusable. Google maps has gone to enormous effort to put together a terrific GIS database -- at least for the US -- but for some reason they insist on presenting map data in a low contrast format that often makes their maps pretty much unusable. You often can't even see secondary roads if you turn terrain display on. And Google itself is so busy spying on its users that many of the services it has gone to great effort to build are compromised. For example, Google News no longer works with the simple text browsers (links, lynx, etc) used by the visually impaired.

And then there is security. I (probably) loaded all the comments in this thread -- a capability that has worked only erratically this weekend presumably thanks to Slashdot's flaky site scripting. Only two comments mention security. Come on folks. Does anyone seriously believe that users can keep confidential information confidential and still load and execute random code from random web sites? Really? You folks believe that?

I don't know how, when or where all this ends. But I'm guessing that it doesn't end very well.

Re: What's the best way to keep the web lean and m

[vtcodger]

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.