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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 MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:17AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:17AM (#731070) Homepage Journal

    The only ads I have anywhere are a few affiliate ads for books. Those ads don't have any Javascript rather they are server side includes that are served from the same host.

    I have always built my sites from hand-coded static HTML and CSS files.

    But how do I monetize all this work you quite reasonably inquire.

    Your organic links boost my standings in the search engines, thereby making it more likely that when a potential client goes looking for a custom software developer, they find me.

    I was running google adsense a while back. I at first rolled it out over my entire site then after one month I removed all but two ad units, those being at the top and at the middle of my article on legal music downloads [warplife.com].

    When my adsense revenue declined I took those ads back off.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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