SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Programmer Drew DeVault writes a blog post about conservative web development after poking at a few popular sites and finding that only 8% of the data downloaded among the megabytes of advertisements, scripts, and third-party scripts is actually related to content. This represents several usability problems. After walking through some of the more problematic symptoms he proposes several steps which can remediate the state of the web.
Today I turned off my ad blocker, enabled JavaScript, opened my network monitor, and clicked the first link on Hacker News - a New York Times article. It started by downloading a megabyte of data as it rendered the page over the course of eight full seconds. The page opens with an advertisement 281 pixels tall, placed before even the title of the article. As I scrolled down, more and more requests were made, downloading a total of 2.8 MB of data with 748 HTTP requests. An article was weaved between a grand total of 1419 vertical pixels of ad space, greater than the vertical resolution of my display. Another 153-pixel ad is shown at the bottom, after the article. Four of the ads were identical.
Aside: Opponents to javascript are often wrongfully framed as Luddites. However, I invite readers to connect the dots; see:
Exploiting Speculative Execution (Meltdown/Spectre) via JavaScript
Web cache poisoning just got real: How to fling evil code at victims
Rowhammer.js Is the Most Ingenious Hack I've Ever Seen and
Oh, great, now there's a SECOND remote Rowhammer exploit
[Ed note: SoylentNews is designed to use no Javascript for normal user interactions. (There are a few staff-accessible pages requiring it, such as the Story Editing page.) I don't know of anyone on staff who would seriously consider changing that. When this site was initially rolling out, we actually tested to make sure it would work on a text-only browser (Lynx) and even Mosaic! So, please enjoy your light-weight, performant web pages here!]
[TMB note: Except the "collapse/expand this whole damned thread" button.]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:33PM (11 children)
Careful, that sarcasm edges dangerously close to being true
Improvements on web design from a quarter century ago:
*JS hamburger menus are marginally less annoying than JS drop down menus
*Designers care if their font and color scheme looks like ass
Regressions:
*Ad hell
*3 billion offsite JS libraries
*Infinite scrolling, can-never-find-anything-ever-again design
*Social media integration
*that obnoxious thing where instead of linking different sections of the page, scrolling makes it like a slideshow, I don't even know what it's called but it's hell
*Content you want? only 3 ajax queries away from loading
*"The algorithm" deciding what order to show things to you.
*Auto. play. videos.
*All that peripheral(top, side, intermezzo) content to "increase engagement".
(Score: 4, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:47PM
Careful, that sarcasm edges dangerously close to being true
The best sarcasm always does!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:07PM (7 children)
Sane web design avoids both, sane web browser would ignore both.
"*Designers care if their font and color scheme looks like ass"
Not an improvement at all. They shouldn't be worrying about fonts or colors at all (there's absolutely no requirement for the user agent to even *have* the capability to display such things, and if they do have that capability, then they should be configured for the convenience of the user, not of of the ad server) and if they simply must specify such things they should do so in the expectation that the UA is likely to ignore them.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:15PM (6 children)
The fact that your awful monospace font makes my eyes roll straight off your post and refuse to read it for the first several tries undercuts your second point.
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:33PM
His what now? I'm using the VT220 theme and I don't know what you're talking about.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:33PM (3 children)
YOUR browser should use a font that you like, rather than a font that random-person-somewhere-else likes. I think that was his point.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:43PM (1 child)
That's dumb, because font choice is situational and contextual. If you're representing some kind of very raw text-file data, monospace is great. If you want a pull quote for an article, switching from sans-serif(easy to read when small) to serif(nice looking when blown up) is a sensible choice.
These are things that people who know the pages they're making should decide, not me. There's no one true font.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday September 06 2018, @07:17AM
Coming from you, that's a compliment. If the designers of the web noticed, I'm sure they appreciated it.
"because font choice is situational and contextual"
Which is exactly why semantic tags are available, so that the browser can be informed of the situation and context.
"sans-serif(easy to read when small) to serif(nice looking when blown up) is a sensible choice."
On your screen, with your eyes, and your wetware.
Situation and context. One moment you cite the importance of those things, the very next breath you're missing them.
"These are things that people who know the pages they're making should decide, not me."
Clearly you shouldn't be deciding anything. Nonetheless, someone familiar with your screen, eyes, and wetware should be making these decisions. As you lack the ability to make decisions, I would recommend finding a local tech. Someone who knows what things like 'SMTP' and 'HTTP' mean. He could help you configure your computer properly.
The last person you should let make decisions about your computer is the 14 year old in Bangalore that just earned $.25 rewriting the website you accidentally visited.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:58PM
Yeah! Fuck Arik! He's trying to control me using monospace!
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday September 06 2018, @04:05AM
I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering how someone who's completely computer illiterate winds up posting on soylent. Care to enlighten us?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:15PM
There is also the awful problem that almost nothing can be printed any more. (How would one even print one of those retarded infinitely expanding pages?)
As if that weren't bad enough, thanks to the current "washed out colors" fad, every time I need to print something from scroogle maps, I have to capture it in to a paint program and adjust it so I can print something READABLE!
(Right, paper is evil and toxic, and it is impossible to grow new trees, so instead buy an expensive $$$$$ iPad that you will use all of a dozen times before it breaks and goes to a landfill)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:51PM
WTF is with all of the sites wanting to load JavaScript libraries from third party sites? Can't they just serve it themselves? Bandwidth is cheap. Is speed really a problem with DSL/Fibre?
It's not like the browser uses a cached version anyway.
Load from Cache is awesome.