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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: 4, Interesting) by stretch611 on Wednesday March 14 2018, @02:41PM (3 children)
IMO, jQuery is a Tool of the Devil.
I remember debugging javascript that was using jQuery.
More often than not it seems that people who use jQuery have a preference for writing crappy code in the fewest characters necessary instead of writing it well designed and readable, I remember the hell it was one particular time when I was trying to debug errant javascript behavior only to realize that the idiot that wrote the original web page used multiple ids with the same exact name. This is something that goes against standards and causes errors, but instead of failing, jQuery trapped the error and let it pass. While some people may think its a good thing and be happy to avoid such an error, people who actually believe in coding standards realize what a nightmare this can cause. (Coding standards is why we look at the IE ERA as hell.)
Even though I feel that people who use jQuery had a preference for writing crap code, it was nothing compared to the few times where I was forced to debug in the level of jQuery code itself. I was greeted by a new level of hell each time I did this. Spaghetti jumping from one place to another and returns everywhere. And I swear they do not allow people to use more than 2 f-ing letters for any variable name. I learned Commodore BASIC with two letter names... It was hell then, its worse now when there is no need to limit yourself. except to write incomprehensible garbage.
And to all those that believe that writing the fewest characters is a sign of "good" coding... May you be subject to the eternal hell of trying to read your own code after not seeing it for six months.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @05:14PM (1 child)
I haven't looked at much (any?) jquery source, but I know their scripts are available in two versions: bloated readable code and 'minified' versions. Hopefully you were using the readable one to debug (that's what its for) but if it was something you were looking at on somebody else's production page it should have been using the minified version.
* minified javascript is machine reduced to decrease the size - all identifiers are replaced with shorter ones, whitespace stripped, etc.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stretch611 on Wednesday March 14 2018, @09:12PM
No, it was not minified. The "other person" was a prior employee of the company I was working for at the time. I had full access to the server and code.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 14 2018, @09:23PM
people are dumbit is a pain to control on user side. Cloned a bunch of notes? Time to scan the damn ids. Although I don't think it lead to anywhere as of now.