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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: 3, Interesting) by cocaine overdose on Wednesday March 14 2018, @01:51PM (7 children)
Going back to the webpages, I recently tried to reverse engineer a design of a popular website. What I found is the same as OSes! Many lines, no documentation (expected), poor or no formatting, redundant functionality, and so many goddamn script loads so the startup can have moving buttons (Look, pa, this one slides on its own!). The entire page is 1MB, and it's just the landing page, primarily composed of numerous CSS stylesheets. (If you want to scream, look at something like VK.com, 15MB of extremely complicated JS and request routing -- but the most bloated file is the fonts.css!) There has been non-stop talk of how modern design is killing the web and we need to stop using all of the tools available (or atleast slow down and think if we really need to max out 8 cores for fancy animations). To this, I say is a futile pursuit. Teason the web is so popular because of all the ways JS/CSS/etc. have attracted all the (over-bearing majority) of casual users. Despite their relatively non-existant standards for good webpages and extensive mobile-use (mobile first was terrible to wrap my head around), they are the prime reason we have had so much innovation in the WWW sphere. Were not for them contributing the snowballing popularity of the internet, and capitalism seeing opportunity to make money, you likely would not have the internet speeds you have today. Or all the functionality of your favorite websites (which are usually someone else's code) like ajax and music that keeps state over different pages. The problem is most certainly a capitalist problem. And as long as there's still money to be made, no amount of idealism will be able to quench greed. The FSF has been reluctant to accept its failure in this.
But there's also the other side of the coin, that webdevs aren't making the web more bloated. They're just using the tools they have to achieve the goals required of them. One of these is to catch user's eyes and make companies money. That means the website has to be novel. So many times have I heard relatively computer-iliterate, but nonetheless web-related consumers, that a website "looks like it's from the 90s" and that they refuse to use it. The websites in question usually do not have anything "wrong" with them, but they're boring and not as feature-rich as some of the more bloated examples they use. The webdevs have to yield to these consumer expectations, lest they make no money and get fired. And that is in effect why you cannot "stop progress" or "go back." If you go back, you die. The only time this is acceptable is for a personal blog or a website that doesn't face consumers (open source software and non-profits face consumers, no matter their thoughts on it). Otherwise, you're just fighting a losing battle.
Now, back to this polish fellow and his talk. He seems like he's bandwagonning onto the exclamations of the underground, without saying anything new. Perhaps the case could be made that he's disseminating their opinions or taking hold on the cusp of how much consumers can tolerate slow websites -- to maximize how much reach his writings have and get more readers. I think the latter is more likely. Considering his extensive coverage (IMHO, whining for views) on the atrocity of technology, and the internet. Another point could be made that's he's a very dumb entrepreneur and a bad webdev trying to lower standards to make it easier for him to make more money. For evidence of this, look no further than: his blog and his "startup" Pinboard. Take note of how complex and intricately designed they seem on the outside.
As to the points in the OP, and the transcript of his talk, I will briefly address them. Rather, try to prove why they're wrong, because I've already invested so much effort into the idea that he is being reactionary for more readers.
[1/2] See below for rest
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cocaine overdose on Wednesday March 14 2018, @01:54PM (2 children)
>This talk isn't about any of those. It's about mostly-text sites that, for unfathomable reasons, are growing bigger with every passing year.
To this, all I have is that websites will indeed grow larger the more years they're around. By virtue of adding more content. However, I don't think that's the point he's making so we'll wait.
> While I'll be using examples to keep the talk from getting too abstract, I’m not here to shame anyone, except some companies (Medium) that should know better and are intentionally breaking the web.
Medium is not a mostly-text site. It's heavily laden with JS, CSS, and images. But I believe he's trying to say those things should not be needed. "Intentionally breaking the web," is a hyperbolic hook and I don't believe he will give examples or address what he means by "breaking the web." Or why he thinks mostly-text sites exist anymore, save remnants of old websites, blogs by internet veterans, and academics' personal pages.
> What do I mean by a website obesity crisis? Here’s an article on GigaOm from 2012 titled "The Growing Epidemic of Page Bloat". It warns that the average web page is over a megabyte in size. The article itself is 1.8 megabytes long.
Reader take note, that GigaOm is a news website. It includes many pictures, user accounts and comments, and responsive design. Reader also take note that the transcript page is also, itself, 1.03 MBs in size (because of the numerous photographs he's decided to use PNG with).
> Here's an almost identical article from the same website two years later, called “The Overweight Web". This article warns that average page size is approaching 2 megabytes. That article is 3 megabytes long. If present trends continue, there is the real chance that articles warning about page bloat could exceed 5 megabytes in size by 2020.
We're already past this point.
> The problem with picking any particular size as a threshold is that it encourages us to define deviancy down. Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design. I would like to anchor the discussion in something more timeless.
I would agree, but "timeless" is terrible for standards. The technology is constantly evolving, and yesterday's "logical" standards are today's "outdated" standards.
> To repeat a suggestion I made on Twitter, I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature. This is a generous yardstick. I could have picked French literature, full of slim little books, but I intentionally went with Russian novels and their reputation for ponderousness.
My propensity to call him a "faggot hipster" is growing larger and larger every passing line. The "major works of Russian literature." I believe he's only read some Dostoevsky and believes himself knowledgeable on Russian literature. Dostoevsky, who, normally writes works around 500-900 pages. I will not deny that many in this group are 400-600 pages, but many are also 100-200 pages (Heart of a Dog, A Hero of Our Time, We, etc.). Even ignoring that his standards are based on false pretense, the yardstick is not generous. Text-based websites? They're all text-based, first, you'll need to refine that, because that's almost every website. But, assuming he means "websites with the majority of content being text," that's still most websites. Assuming he means websites like his blog, that use for the most part ONLY text for display, it's still a misguided thought. Websites aren't only text. They have formatting and positioning to make it readable. The Russian literature has this to, but it barely affects the overall page count. That formatting is going to take up a large chunk of data, that is necessary to have a readable interface.
> their reputation for ponderousness.
Russian novels are also known for being large and bloated.
>In Goncharov's Oblomov, for example, the title character spends the first hundred pages just getting out of bed. If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big. That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew. For a single tweet.
I so very much want to call him a moron. Twitter is not just text, it has further functionality (like replies/searching/images/extensive formatting/liking/following) that has to take up data to be there. The Master and Margarita is just text. And you're basing your standards off comparing apples to artichokes. One is a healthy, but difficult to eat, vegetable. While the other is a sweet, juicy, and sugary snack. Any book you put on the web will be most certainly larger than in plaintext. HTML takes up space, a lot of space in comparison. A snarky comment: Maybe this is why he hasn't achieved anything else except for selling one OK product to Slacker News. He's unaware of his terrible shortcomings.
>Or consider this 400-word-long Medium article on bloat, which includes the sentence: "Teams that don’t understand who they’re building for, and why, are prone to make bloated products." The Medium team has somehow made this nugget of thought require 1.2 megabytes. That's longer than Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s psychological thriller about an impoverished student who fills his head with thoughts of Napoleon and talks himself into murdering an elderly money lender. Racked by guilt, so rattled by his crime that he even forgets to grab the money, Raskolnikov finds himself pursued in a cat-and-mouse game by a clever prosecutor and finds redemption in the unlikely love of a saintly prostitute. Dostoevski wrote this all by hand, by candlelight, with a goddamned feather.
See my previous comments. He's spending more time on explaining the books he's read than furthering his point, i.e contributing to bloat.
> I could go on in this vein. And I will, because it's fun!
He goes on for another 7 paragraphs drawing comparisons to literature and modern websites. While doing all of the things I've complained about in my previous comments. I feel burned out having to point out every goddamn flaw that should've been addressed by him pre-speech. I won't be able to do the entire thing. So:
(Score: 2) by cocaine overdose on Wednesday March 14 2018, @01:57PM (1 child)
> These Apple sites exemplify what I call Chickenshit Minimalism. It's the prevailing design aesthetic of today's web. I wrote an essay about this on Medium. Since this is a fifty minute talk, please indulge me while I read it to you in its entirety: "Chickenshit Minimalism: the illusion of simplicity backed by megabytes of cruft."
This author exemplifies what I call "Chickenshit's Dunning Kruger." It's the prevailing disease of today's "writers" and "entrepreneurs." Succinctly, it can be explained as: "Chickenshit's Dunning Kruger: When your ego is so big and your intelligence so low, that you think one success makes you infallible."
>Finally, I want to talk about our giant backends. How can we expect our web interfaces to be slim when we're setting such a bad example on the server side?
Stop. More and more people use websites. Synchronous programming no longer works and just about every website needs load-balancing. You unintelligible troglodyte.
>Most website work is pretty routine. You hook up a database to a template, and make sure no one trips over the power cord. But automation at scale? That's pretty sweet, and it's difficult!
Stop. You cannot compare the simple MyPhpAdmin you setup years ago to what most companies need to do now.
> That's what it feels like to be a programmer, lost in the cloud. Complexity is like a bug light for smart people. We can't resist it, even though we know it's bad for us. This stuff is just so cool to work on.
See: "Chickentshit's Dunning Krugar." You're not a programmer, you're a webdev.
>Adam Drake wrote an engaging blog post about analyzing 2 million chess games. Rather than using a Hadoop cluster, he just piped together some Unix utilities on a laptop, and got a 235-fold performance improvement over the 'Big Data' approach. The point is not that people using Hadoop clusters are foolish, or that everything can be done on a laptop. It's that many people's intuition about what constitutes a large system does not reflect the reality of 2015 hardware. You can do an awful lot on a laptop, or pizza box web server, if you skip the fifty layers of overhead.
Right tool for the job, etc. etc. Unix utils work great for structured string processing, Hadoop works great for an alayzing HUGE (terabytes, where the chess games were only 1.7GBs) amounts of unstructured data and being able to horizontally scale it by using other machine's hardware. Bash cannot do this. And Bash utils are just C.
>Let me give you a concrete example. I recently heard from a competitor, let’s call them ACME Bookmarking Co., who are looking to leave the bookmarking game and sell their website. [...] Rather than trying to make your overbuilt projects look simple, ask yourself if they can't just be simple.
The author goes on to bash a competitor, that may or may not exist.
>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.
Too late. He hasn't said why this should be a noble goal, except pointing to bloat. It seems awkwardly placed, and the intent behind might be to rouse the crowd with some vapid "rebel against society" hype.
> Let’s commit to the idea that as computers get faster, and as networks get faster, the web should also get faster.
It is faster. But just like CPU power, bandwidth, and RAM, non-utilized it's wasted. Take note, that there is a difference between smart utilization and taking over an entire core.
> 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.
Who knows what this means.
> 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.
Thank you. I almost thought keeping the web as only HTML was the worst aside. Why is this statement here at all?
> The way to keep giant companies from sterilizing the Internet is to make their sites irrelevant. If all the cool stuff happens elsewhere, people will follow. We did this with AOL and Prodigy, and we can do it again.
The cool stuff is novel, flashy, hip websites. The "cool stuff" is not granddad's water color paints encyclopedia (for the majority).
> For this to happen, it's vital that the web stay participatory. That means not just making sites small enough so the whole world can visit them, but small enough so that people can learn to build their own, by example.
For educational and humanitarian purposes, sure. For companies that need to make money? No. People can already learn to build their own websites that rival billion-dollar companies. The only thing stopping them is their persistence to work through tough challenges.
I'm starting to believe this talk was for no other reason, but to express the author's mediocrity and inability to make a good website. If everyone agrees with his talk, surely he must be "doing fine." Maybe that's what those two awkward statements about "privacy" and "keep the internet great" were about: ear-candy for more agreement.
> I don't care about bloat because it's inefficient. I care about it because it makes the web inaccessible.
Is this what the talk was about? I really don't know.
> Keeping the Web simple keeps it awesome. Thank you very much! HEAVY, ROILING, TROUBLED SEAS OF APPLAUSE
The absolute, chickenshit, madman.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15 2018, @04:26AM
tl;dr lol
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @03:42PM (1 child)
you want to get a blog or something and put this there?
might save you some time considering your 1/2 is 3/4 and counting. if you had your own platform you could make it all formatted for your audience in a way that doesn't require them to determine what you're talking about in a way other than is already required.
(Score: 2) by cocaine overdose on Wednesday March 14 2018, @05:10PM
(Score: 1) by TheSage on Thursday March 15 2018, @06:48AM (1 child)
It's Dunning Kruger btw.
(Score: 2) by cocaine overdose on Thursday March 15 2018, @08:37AM