SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Maciej Ceglowski, proprietor of the Pinboard bookmarking site, spoke back on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney, Australia about the problem of increasingly bloated web pages. His talk describes the nature of the bloat problem, fake attempts at pretending to fix it, the bloat that advertisements contribute, mishandling of images, unreasonable crufty javascript frameworks, time wasting layouts, sluggish backends, and why it is important to address these issues. The reasons to do so go well beyond just aesthetics and efficiency.
Here's the hortatory part of the talk:
Let’s preserve the web as the hypertext medium it is, the only thing of its kind in the world, and not turn it into another medium for consumption, like we have so many examples of already.
Let’s commit to the idea that as computers get faster, and as networks get faster, the web should also get faster.
Let’s not allow the panicked dinosaurs of online publishing to trample us as they stampede away from the meteor. Instead, let's hide in our holes and watch nature take its beautiful course.
Most importantly, let’s break the back of the online surveillance establishment that threatens not just our livelihood, but our liberty. Not only here in Australia, but in America, Europe, the UK—in every free country where the idea of permanent, total surveillance sounded like bad science fiction even ten years ago.
He closes with an appeal to address these concerns in order to improve general accessibility of the WWW, which correlates with its general awesomeness.
From The Website Obesity Crisis (transcript)
The Website Obesity Crisis (video)
[Ed note: Though some of the admin functions for SoylentNews use Javascript, the user-facing side is entirely Javascript-free; everything is done with straight HTML and CSS. --martyb]
[TMB note: I wish. We never could figure out a way to do collapsible comment trees how we wanted to entirely without Javascript and it's also required for subscriptions paid through Stripe.]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday March 14 2018, @12:24PM (6 children)
Money is now involved in the process of media consumption online. It is now impossible to remove the impact of media consumption on the internet, and I would posit that it is a significant enough part of the U.S. economy that attempting to ignore or remove it would cause more damage than it is worth. It's probably, in its way, literally a national security function now (ever since someone decided that economic strength is a national security matter). The bottom line there is: If it is cheaper and more profitable to cruft up a webpage and you still get the requisite number of eyeballs for financial benefit, and taking the time for fine crafted design utilizes more money than it profits the process, the industry will not change. Users, by and large, will not care if their pages take 3-5 seconds more to load and consume 10-20% more processing power - not when there is an optimax of allowable crufting-to-profit ratio that is found empirically. Companies will not care that they are requiring unnecessary libraries and bad code to cross the pipes so long as Joe Sixpack gets his sports news promptly enough and Jane Slimfast gets her cat pictures.
To truly allow what is being spoken of here requires a new web - one whose selling point is more genuine information or product at better speeds. A new standard, hopefully not polluted by bloat or js.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday March 14 2018, @12:43PM
The economy is rightfully considered a national security matter.
Better economies have an easier time building weapons than do worse economies. And should a war break out the stronger economy will succeed at putting its troops and guns whereever the battlefield may be.
A while I read a truly sorrowful post by an American soldier who served with some Egyptian troops. He said he always had plenty to eat:
"An Army runs on its stomach. That's why they always had plenty of turkey sandwiches for us."
But his Egyptian friends had so little to eat, and of such poor quality that they were slowly starving.
That's not quite what you want when the order to ATTACK AT DAWN comes down.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday March 14 2018, @12:46PM
Jakob Nielsen says you're wrong:
He studies real users by employing such devices as custom proxies that report where and when the test volunteer is on the web.
His studies conclusively demonstrated that your page has just two seconds to load and render before the user will click the Back button then go find some other page.
All that whizzy analytics that so many webmasters are creaming their jeans for must not provide this information, or such pages as Hilary For President wouldn't have more than a thousand resources contained in just her homepage.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday March 14 2018, @12:48PM (2 children)
Tor just has to slow lots of things down.
Perhaps if Facebook had a .onion address its Javascript would finally work in Pale Moon.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday March 14 2018, @04:14PM (1 child)
Does facebookcorewwwi.onion [wikipedia.org] work for you? I can't test it myself because I'm not a Facebook member.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday March 14 2018, @06:11PM
All I have with me is my very Tor-unfriendly iPhone
I'll try it after I get home from work tonight
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday March 14 2018, @09:34PM
> Joe Sixpack gets his sports news promptly enough and Jane Slimfast gets her cat pictures
Without touching on the sexism in that statement, I do need to point out that it's now Joe Barrel and Jane Sparetire. Their son, Xavier Xander Lipids does care about how quickly he can multitask between porn pages and teen social media, not that he always sees a difference.