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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: 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