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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 05 2018, @04:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the less-is-more dept.

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.]


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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:13PM (1 child)

    by RamiK (1813) on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:13PM (#730957)

    I appreciate two types of approaches to web content delivery: The clean html5+css type that avoids javascript like a plague and aims at the smoothest possible delivery of content. And the pure wasm web application like those in-browser games that just draws its own frame and gives us all the bells and whistles and really focuses on innovating helpful features.

    What I hate is the current state of things: When people use hundreds of scripts to twist html into something its clearly not.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:56PM (#731273)

    I've seen a couple of sites like that. There are ads on the page, embedded in boxes, and obviously ads. Small pictures, words, with links to other sites.
    One of them had a rollover so if your mouse goes over it then it fires a request off. Fine. Don't care.
    No third party JS. It all just worked. I don't see why everyone doesn't just do this.