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.]
Related Stories
Low-tech Magazine explains how to build a low-tech web site, using its own (solar powered) web site as an example. They cover both the web design and the actual hardware in use, an Olimex A20. The idea is to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing the content, seeing as complex designs with Javascript have burdensome resource requirements that translate into increased use of electricity. Renewable power sources alone are not enough to address the growing energy use of the Internet. Their server is also self-hosted so there's no need for third-party tracking and cookies either.
Low-tech Magazine was born in 2007 and has seen minimal changes ever since. Because a website redesign was long overdue — and because we try to practice what we preach — we decided to build a low-tech, self-hosted, and solar-powered version of Low-tech Magazine. The new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.
Earlier on SN:
Conservative Web Development (2018)
About a Third of All Web Sites Run on WordPress (2018)
Please, Keep your Blog Light (2018)
"Front-end" developer, Pete Lambert, writes about why front-end "web" developers should start to learn HTML. More and more developers are using only pre-made frameworks and quite unfamiliar with the fundmentals of the technology they are using, such as semantic markup. He notes that the continued failure to pay attention to the basics of semantics is slowly breaking what's left of the World Wide Web and suggests reasons to correct that and has some pointers to learning resources.
I’m a ‘frontend of the frontend’ kind of guy. My expertise is in HTML and CSS, so it’s easy for me to wax lyrical about why everybody should learn what I already know (for the record, I don’t know it all - we still have heated debates in the office about what the best way to mark up a certain component might be). This isn’t about ‘my job’s more important than yours. If you’re writing code that renders things in a browser, this is your job.
It’s about usability and accessibility. If you don’t think the semantic structure of your Web page or app is important then you’re essentially saying “Well, it works for me in my browser, ship it”. I don’t think you’d do that with your Javascript and you certainly shouldn’t be doing it with your CSS. Search engines need to read your content, not enjoy your swoopy animations or fancy gradients. Screen reader software needs to read your content. Keyboard users need to read your content. Who knows what technology will come next and how it will consume your app but I’ll bet my bottom Bitcoin it’ll work better if it can easily read, parse and traverse your content. The way these things read your content is that they know it’s actually content and not just strings of text wrapped in meaningless tags. They know what’s a table and how to present it, they know what’s a list and how to present it, they know what’s a button and what’s a checkbox. Make everything from divs and they’re going to have to work bloody hard to figure that out.
Earlier on SN:
How to Build and Host an Energy Efficient Web Site (2018)
Conservative Web Development (2018)
Dodgy Survey Shows 1 in 10 Believe HTML is an STD? (2014)
Assistant professor Jeff Huang has written a sort of manifesto for preserving content on the web. He goes over seven points that should be familiar to all yet will nevertheless be found to be novel by some. New or not, they are essential to follow if one wishes to future-proof a web site. Like other best practices, such as usability design and accessibility design, which are also currently increasingly ignored, the points in the manifesto are also less work to follow than to ignore.
- Return to vanilla HTML/CSS
- Don't minimize that HTML
- Prefer one page over several
- End all forms of hotlinking
- Stick with the 13 web-safe fonts +2
- Compress and rescale your images
- Monitor for URLs
Earlier on SN:
What's One Thing I Wish I Understood Better About Web Accessibility? (2019)
How to Build and Host an Energy Efficient Web Site (2018)
Conservative Web Development (2018)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:15PM (29 children)
Be as conservative on resources as you want. The marketing department will still add tons of crap from third party sites. No matter how much you save, you can never make up for what Marketing will add. If you save an extra byte, they'll add a megabyte to make up for it. Sort of like the federal budget.
I can personally recommend: uMatrix
It's only for nerds. Probably not for everyone. Definitely not for granny.
Thanks SN for a lightweight enjoyable experience.
Unix, like the government, started out as a few essential services.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:25PM (12 children)
The web exists for one purpose: to sell crap.
If you're a web "developer" then you're working for Marketing, and you're a fool to delude yourself into believing you're good for anything. Graduate to real programming or you're just another worthless copypasta web designer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Freeman on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:41PM (6 children)
That wasn't the original intention as the creators were academics. The original purpose of the internet was to share information. It's also good at selling junk, yes.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:58PM
"Owwwwwwwwww! Iiiit huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurts!" she screamed. It did not take long for tears to start running down her face. She checked her leg, and was shocked to see an awful scrap wound on her knee, as well as a twisted ankle. What had happened here? The little girl, Sally, had just been riding her bike on the sidewalk; at some point, the bike tipped over, resulting in these terrible injuries. To make matters worse, no one was around to help her. Or, so she thought.
The girl, who was staring down at her injuries, suddenly saw someone's legs in front of her. So, she looked up, and what she saw startled her. It was a man. It was a very tall man with excessively large eyes and a piercing gaze. This man, Ricko, was looking down at her with eyes full of curiosity. For a moment, Sally believed that the man was there to help her, but his next facial expression instantly made her believe otherwise. The girl hadn't even noticed that another man had crept up behind her. Thus, the two men took turns.
First, it was Ricko's turn. Then, it was Ericham's turn. Next, it was once again Ricko's turn. Then, Ericham. Ricko. Ericham. Ricko. Ericham. Ricko. Ericham. Ricko. Ericham. Ricko. Ericham. Ricko. Ericham. Ricko. Ericham. Ricko. Ericham. The men each waited for their turn, like proper gentlemen. What's more, each man enjoyed themselves thoroughly. Oh, did they enjoy themselves.
Ricko used his favorite pocket knife. Ericham used his trusty mallet. Together, the amazing duo inflicted extraordinary pain upon little Sally as they violated her in a variety of positions. As the girl sustained an increasing number of stab wounds and broken bones, she became more and more quiet. The men noticed that, as the girl's body accumulated damage, they had to dispense an ever-increasing level of force in order to elicit a reaction from the toy. This fact displeased them, but they were determined to eat their fill. That is precisely what they did, until it was all over. Then, they felt only one emotion.
Disgusting. The men were thoroughly disgusted. The little girl had gone silent, leaving nothing of note behind. The two men tried to beat and stab the girl more, but she didn't react any longer. It was over. The men spat on the unmoving toy, and then departed for greener pastures. After all, staying with that piece of trash that didn't react to anything would be a waste of time.
Ricko and Ericham continued walking away, towards a future filled with lively children who could scream, cry, and beg for mercy. Ricko and Ericham continued walking away, towards a future where men's rights reigned supreme.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:15PM (4 children)
It's optimized to show junk, which the junk senders believe is interesting information, yet the recipients tend to consider annoying or gross.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:19PM (3 children)
To take you too seriously: it's optimized to send data.
Data that is useless garbage is much easier to create than data that resembles useful information. Data that resembles useful information and is true is even harder to create. Data that is useful information, factually correct, fully contextualized and suited to purpose is basically impossible.
The number of webpages that even approach that third case is vanishingly small. Wikipedia, maybe.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:52PM
Another third case webpage is (most of - do avoid their "intended for the public") IAEA's pages. I frequent three of their database ARIS (reactor technology overview), PRIS (data on operation of currently operating power reactors) and INIS (60+ years of nuclear articles from various publications for the field).
The trick seems to be to get it to the point where the density of data is high enough that an encyclopedia seems fluffy. (Lots of technology companies (not IT, but proper tech; think Siemens, Samsung, Mitshubishi, IBM, and similar) actually tend to have proper fluff-free pages once you get past the public-facing crap. Also the engineering sections of most companies tend to have pretty nice pages)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @11:04PM (1 child)
Remembering grandpa's days, JavaScript is the re-incarnation of the Door-to-Door salesman.
Their one goal was to get their foot in the door. Once that foot was wedged in, you could not close the door, and they knew that.
One had to develop a knack of kicking their foot back out then very quickly closing the door before they could reinsert.
The original "script blocker".
I am quite sure doing this was in clear violation of their business model, but back then Congress would have doubled over in laughter had some business lobbyist brought such a thing up.
I guess it was about two or three years ago I adopted NoScript, being I had just been slipped a dose of malware on a web site. I brought up my woe on this very site and you guys knew exactly what to do. I ended up doing a lot of research only to discover that JavaScript is way too powerful to hand to a business website programmer, way too many ways it can be used to deceive a customer.
I came to the conclusion that JavaScript, like fine print in contracts, is a prime candidate shady businesses use to pull fast ones on an ignorant and trusting customers. I see that and the hair stands up on me like someone approaching me with a gun and ski mask on.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday September 06 2018, @11:50PM
The sneakiest malware deliverer I ever saw was when I was going to see what these Facebook Games were all about. I didn't even get to the first game, before the ad server tried serving me up a dish of malware. I've had 0% interest in even looking at a Facebook game since. Makes some sense that one of the largest websites is one of the juiciest targets, but wow that was crazy. Not sure, if I had adblock at that time or some other alternative. I generally used Flashblock + Adblock Plus. Now, I typically just stick with uBlock Origin. I've been quite interested in setting up Pi Hole on one of my Raspberry Pis, I just haven't taken the time to mess with it.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:23PM (2 children)
I so feel like that is true sometimes. :-)
I work on a commercial web based business application. Not a "web site". No ads. The vast majority of what I do is unrelated to HTML, and CSS. Some logic is in JavaScript, but just to verify things before the server would have to reject them for the same reason. I still have to know HTML, CSS, SSL/TLS, and other "web things". I have full control of every byte that gets sent to the browser.
Wait . . . I saw a video with a song once on the Green site which said . . . the internet is for pr0n!
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:56PM
That's what their trying to sell you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @08:49AM
So many great songs in that musical:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74bkUkVGvgg [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @05:55AM
I'm in the net since 1990s. This marketing websites appearing everywhere is not so old. I always used Google to find useful information. Now it tries to sell me a stuff I don't need. This happened slowly in recent decade, starting from a result here or there, but now it jumped to entire search results pages. Looking for expansion board "pinout" loads me tons of totally unneeded e-shopping crap because if you change letters in board's name it'll fit the query, while the "pinout" sits in the fourth page. Sorry for quotes in a pinout word, that's a habit now, "I" "have" "to" "write" "everything" "in" "quotes" to make G show me less crap, but even it doesn't work now.
This needs some anarchy-related freaks to make a completely human-reviewed non-commercial content search engine. Only moderator's delusio... sorry paradigms :) should be compatible with web's primary goal as it was.
And for videos - no, our technology is not mature enough for it. It's not easily searchable nor skippable as textual/image information. Modern video-oriented web is the same as TV - to place-in and advertise products. Give users an interface to make query in videos and it will not be a step back.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:56PM
and then you realize on the backend that you're still spending a lot of time on analytics and marketing, because that's what major companies care about. big data and digesting it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:10PM
I second that. I go out, venture far and wide from home on the web. anymore it sucks, with laborious adware, spyware, gratuitous ajax calls, stupid, pointless javascript driven UI drivel, and then i come back home to soylent and breathe a long sigh of relief and contentment. thanks, guys, for building and keeping this little patch of paradise.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:21PM (12 children)
Yes, uMatrix is awesome. Learning the UI is a slight challenge. And even then you must figure out that you have to save what you've taught it. The more you teach it, the less you have to fuss with each new website.
The downside: some sites pull in so many javascript libraries that they won't work until you've enabled most of the 3rd party sites, and it can be annoying to figure out which of the dozen sites you need to allow in (test, reload, test, reload...)
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:29PM (3 children)
One trick is to whitelist some things that you universally want to allow. Suppose if right under soylentnews.org, there were a long list of third party sites. And I ALWAYS want foobar.com to be allowed.
1. Click on the asterisk next to the soylentnews.org domain name in blue
2. Green-list foobar.com, now you'll never have to green list it again
3. Click save
4. Deselect the asterisk by clicking the domain name in blue
5. Now green-list any other things that are just for soylentnews.org (if there were no ad sites to banish would they make a sound?)
6. Slick save
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:12PM (1 child)
Thanks DannyB. Yeah, I pretty much figured that all out, but again, the UI wasn't immediately obvious to me. I have uMatrix installed, but not enabled at this time, and haven't used it in a couple of months. The thing I remember not grasping: the split upper and lower red / green- what's the significance of the upper versus lower?
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:38PM
Clicking the upper toggles between default and "full solid green".
The lower toggles between default and "full solid red".
That seems to be my experience.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:45PM
Umatrix is an improvement over this. By default it allows the current site to load css, images, javascript. By default it allows only css and images from third party sites. It shows what type of objects are being loaded and can temp allow or permanently allow or block. Which means that allowing JavaScript for google.com on google.com works, but doesn't allow their JS to run anywhere else by default.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:31PM (7 children)
If enabling a few harmless looking ones doesn't work, then I usually give up. Or use a different browser in a VM which is reserved just for this porpoise.
(Also on my tip above, you can permanently red-list items in the global scope so you never have to red-list them again.)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:09PM (4 children)
Great idea, but I don't have any hardware that will run a VM fast enough to process webpages. Rendering is bad enough bare metal!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:37PM (3 children)
That is too sad. Sorry.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:53AM (2 children)
That a 3.2GHz dual core is terribly slow (not), or that software has ballooned into a steaming pile?
Good Old Opera renders most webpages pretty fast, but Vivaldi (based on Chrome) is pretty slow, and that's with some good filters / blockers. And much of the slowness is disk activity (on Windows).
I also notice generally that well-written clean webpages (validator.w3.org) render much faster than pages with hundreds (or thousands) of errors. I know that sounds like a "duh" statement, but the point I'm making is: people, please clean up your code. There are free error checkers out there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:48PM (1 child)
masochist
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday September 06 2018, @11:44PM
Conqueror
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:37PM
When you refer to "this porpoise" [wikipedia.org] are you talking about yourself or some other creature that you allow to browse the Internet?
😁
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday September 05 2018, @11:11PM
Its a real shame that internet businesses put this kind of stuff in that people have to go to such lengths to avoid stepping in.
The storefront analogy would be a business that has a sizeable quantity of human poop outside their storefront, and people are going to great lengths to enter the store without getting poop on their shoes.
Now, consider the store proprietor is actually hiring the homeless to camp around his storefront and poop there!
Yes, the internet has shown, there are actually businesspeople who will actually pay for this!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Absolutely.Geek on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:09AM (1 child)
I also use uMatrix; it is a bit of work, but once you have your rules setup the web flows much quicker and far more secure.
The side effect of running uMatrix is that you understand just how much shit is being shoveled through "regular" connections at every click
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:08PM
All that, what you said . . . and . . . it makes you more paranoid.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:23PM (6 children)
Unfortunately, there is no monetary incentive to streamline websites. So we are stuck.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:26PM
Meanwhile making your life miserable by constantly intruding to tell you to buy shit you don't need is a 12 figure industry.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:09PM (2 children)
You're absolutely right. Y'all should send me lots of money.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:48PM (1 child)
Dude, if people login they can set their defaults to 'show all' which bypasses the javascript expand problem.
That said, JS used to work fine in Sleipnir mobile until the last change. So, now I either logon or use something else on mobile.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:59PM
Yeah, I read at -1 myself but some folks wanted that functionality, so they got it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:32PM (1 child)
There is a monetary incentive. But they cannot see it.
Instead they complain, and ask: how can we draw people to our web site?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @11:25PM
God knows how many websites I visit that flat don't work with ad-blockers.
I found that out when I tried to price some tires online so I could see which brick-and-mortar local businesses that had my particular size and price. Ended up getting them at WalMart because I got so fed up with nonfunctional websites. And I did not want to have to call on dozens of businesses only to be told they did not have them, or that I was going to have to haggle. I hate to haggle. But many businesses have haggling built into their price. That kind of stuff really discourages me, as I want a good price, pay, and go.
However, the websites I use the most for buying stuff online ( Amazon, AliExpress, DigiKey, Mouser ) work great. But then, they are big enough to tell the script men "NO!" when they show up, cash in hand, wanting to place their ad on the site.... knowing full good and well once they have found a site owner that will place that ad which sends the customer away, they can now do anything with that unwitting customer that trusted the original site he visited. Any site owner arbitrarily letting ad-men take their customer is playing a really risky game with the trust of that customer, as once that customer is in the grips of the ad-men's code, the ad-men can rape the customer, and the original site owner takes the hit for it.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:24PM (20 children)
Just make your website look like it's still 1995, problem solved.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:30PM
No thanks, I like HTML5 video a lot better than Macromedia Shockwave.
(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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:18PM
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ [motherfuckingwebsite.com] (content SFW, unless company filters don't like curse words)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:45PM (5 children)
No thanks, we got rid of geocities and I'd rather not bring it back via emulation.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:18PM (4 children)
What made geocities suck was that it was a testbed for all the tricks making the current internet suck. Like any prototype, the flashing scrolling garish text was butt ugly, but now is being employed in much more sophisticated ways that ARE much prettier, but still as annoying. Essentially, geocities never went away, it just evolved into something worse.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:48PM (3 children)
It's funny to think back to twenty years ago when pop-up ads were all the rage. People complained about them and the complaints even made it into the magazines (remember those?). Pretty soon a browser came along that could block pop-up ads, and then the other browsers copied this feature.
Now pop-ups are back and there is no way to block them unless JavaShit and CSS are both disabled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:36PM
Hmm, so a css rendering engine that can avoid placing components over other components... that'd be tough to do well but could work.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:14PM (1 child)
I use Firebug or the like to kill crap like that manually, but there's gotta be a way to automate it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 05 2018, @11:56PM
Semantic machine learning of actual page doms of with-ad and without-ad designs is probably the only way to ever automate it.
Because the fuckers have learned: you can't have any class, id, or DOM structure that's not randomized or those damned end users are gonna block your genius popover.
So the end game of the ad race is just to click this is an ad, highlight a section of the screen, and wait for like 100 other people to ID the same ad.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by KritonK on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:35PM (8 children)
Speaking of vertical pixel space, what's with this fad of designing web pages so that they contain tons of useless vertically stacked images, interspersed with short phrases, that convey little to no information, written with a huge font on colorful backgrounds, where you have to scroll waaay down at the bottom, hoping to find a few links, pointing to the actual information? The web doesn't have to look like the start page of Windows 8!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @05:38PM (2 children)
See subject.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday September 06 2018, @08:54AM (1 child)
Such pages are equally useless on smartphones. You have to scroll down at the bottom of the page, where the links to the actual information are. Worse, still, if you are on a smartphone, those links are in a normal size font, so you'll have a hard time clicking on them.
I'm talking about pages that look something like:
[Image of pretty girl smiiling]
Solve all your problems!
[Image of suited young man, apparently happy with his unspecified job]
New! Improved!
[Image of happy, multiracial group of people]
Increase your productivity!
...
etc. etc.
...
About us Downloads
Products Support
You want to learn about the company? You have to click on the link at the bottom.
You want information about their products? The same.
You want to download their software? Ditto.
You want support? You get the picture.
You want to see pretty pictures? My guess is that you are not going to visit this site for that!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:56PM
I guess the point was that people who carry these "smart"phones are mental midgets who ... wait for it ... LIKE TO SCROLL!
The get to fondle their slabs, their new favorite passtime. And oh boy, it's so quite tactile that even a toddler would love it!
Kinda like what happened at the other place that was abandoned because of their abuses for the greener pastures of SN.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:37PM (4 children)
I remember a time when a news article was formatted like this.
One page. Only one paragraph of the article. Surrounded with loud blinking animated dancing seizure-inducing ads. And followed by:
< 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 >
Then you could click each number, which was a link, to a similar ad-loaded page with one paragraph of text.
Many sites started doing this.
That didn't last long.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:47PM (1 child)
i wish I could click a "for mobile" or "printer friendly" and get the basic page.
because google, for mobile is the default, and that's what we're trying to avoid.
there is no printer friendly page anymore. maybe something google can scan when saved to google drive or what microsoft can scan when saved to one drive, but i think if the printer is local they only want to let you print if it can waste the 2nd page with a banner ad that ignores your do not print color preferences.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:53PM
Get a user agent switcher plugin and set it to a mobile agent code.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:16PM
I always switched to Lynx for those. It was my FU to the UI a-holes who built them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @11:35PM
"Outbrain" still does this. Except its "next page", not a number.
Clicking on it will give me another tiny snippet hidden amongst many ads, many of which have buttons that look like the way out.
I have learned to not click on ANYTHING if I see their logo anywhere around. Only thing safe to click is the "close" button.
"You are in a maze of twisty little passages... all alike."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:00PM
...is that they're designed to be archiving resilient i.e. they are laced with craptchas and/or ajax to foil archiving attemps.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:13PM (1 child)
The fact that SN does not require scripts to be functional is a testimony of good design. It also shows that it takes expertise for good functional design, and, more importantly, you do not necessarily need scripts for good design.
We can argue about small details and what not... However, it does not matter because this site does _exactly_ what it was designed to do. _That_ is the most important thing.
I applaud all those who have been involved. A big thank you from me.
BTW, it took less than 140 kByte data download for the frontpage to show.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @07:42PM
you know those screwdrivers that have a little lamp inside and you can jam into wall sockets and see if they're live and sh1t?
well "soylentnews.org" is my lil screw-driver for the internet.: i can mess around tcp/ip, firewall, dns, about:config and whatnot ... then test the setting
on "soylentnews.org".
if the page loads you know youre settings are okay.
with other pages, being slow and clumsy and 3rdparty, javascript and dns-resolveable dependant and what not, there's no way to know.
if "soylentnews.org" loads, you know you got internet and the problem is somewhere else : )
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:22PM (4 children)
Most websites are set up primarily to make money. This may or may not involve providing useful information to users, and a lot of the things that make money are downright hostile to informing users. Throwing in as many ads as possible, and nowadays as many tracking scripts as possible, has been par for the course since the late 1990's at least.
There is one relatively recent cause for increased JS bloat, though: cryptocurrency mining. I remember noticing a very substantial drop in CPU usage after installing NoCoin List [github.com] in my ad blocker. And that was on mainstream sites, I might mention, not fly-by-night or borderline-criminal sites.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:12PM (1 child)
Most mainstream sites are borderline-criminal. They are stalking you.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 06 2018, @05:54PM
But they also have enough clout to write the laws so that stalking you isn't illegal.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 05 2018, @10:18PM
I wish there was a way to make those adscripts shove their heads up their own rectums. Let them burn their cycles.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @02:01PM
I for one think if you're using a blacklist on the internet you're doing it wrong.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Wednesday September 05 2018, @06:24PM (13 children)
TFS states:
I think this is too draconian, frankly.
For instance, on That Other Site, when you moderate, right by the mod drop down, the remaining number of points is shown, and the entire bloody page doesn't need to reload when you moderate, which would be (and is, here) just a waste of bandwidth and the user's time. That is an entirely benign use of javascript, and as far as I'm concerned, is just the kind of thing that justifies its existence.
I'd be perfectly okay with javascript used to benefit the users. That's a far cry from the abuses advertisers put it to.
Lynx... yeah, that's probably going too far at this point in time. And...
My mod points example above is a demonstration of how the pages are less performant than they could otherwise be if they did use javascript. So there's that.
Just my .02
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday September 05 2018, @07:20PM (6 children)
Just do all your mods at one time at the end rather than on each item. This way, you save a point if someone has already modded a story to max or min.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Wednesday September 05 2018, @08:51PM (5 children)
Doesn't keep track of how many points I've spent, so it's not as useful as a mod-right here, right-now would be to me, and it still requires two page loads instead of one, (one to mod, one to reload to drive the mods home) so it's 200% of the bandwidth that would otherwise be required. Also, I'd forget sometimes, which may just be a "me-old-man" problem, but it's still an actual problem.
Mod-now Javascript would be better in these regards. No way around it.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:25PM (4 children)
Not a web programmer, so this is a serious question, but wouldn't adding javascript modding code to every comment pretty much negate the reloading bandwidth argument?
And you're adding it to every page for everyone, not just those modding that page.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Thursday September 06 2018, @03:52AM (1 child)
The js function would only be defined once on the page. Each Moderate button would just call the same defined function. You could slim the page with js by removing the moderate's combo box from every comment (15 select options * number of comments is a lot). Then when clicking moderate you'd get a small modal (or something) where you can select the rating and submit or cancel.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday September 06 2018, @05:44AM
Or, you could have the javascript dynamically create the drop-downs on the client side as the page is rendered. They could look the same, but work better, take much less bandwidth than embedded, sent-over-the-net drop-downs, not require page reloads at all, and be able to display the current mod point count. All you need is an element with an id per comment, probably just the comment number, or very close to that. Very efficient. Same goes for the visible mod state of the comment itself: easily done, very efficient.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fyngyrz on Thursday September 06 2018, @05:33AM (1 child)
No. It can be done very efficiently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @07:53PM
there's a app for that ... kidding, no, srsly!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DarkMorph on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:52PM (1 child)
It always bothered me that most sites will have commonly consistent elements, like some kind of navigation, header, footer, those sorts of things, and for every (well, most) pages you visit for a site designed this way, you continue to be bombarded with the same collection of markup each page load. Surely there's a better way? Assets like JS or CSS are cached, but not fragments of HTML. Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the user on the same page, loading the common HTML just once, and let JS take care of going from page to page? Make an async call, get data in a JSON, run some logic to present this data on the fly... Yeah, it would completely trash the back/forward buttons since asynchrnous requests don't count as browsing history...
Oh, wait. There is a way to do this (at least partially, anyway) -- but for some reason the Internet decided it was bad design to use them.
They're called frames.
Of course, frames were awfully limiting if used, but it was the only non-JS/AJAX solution to the idea described and rather than evolving, it was left behind in the dust. Unfortunately if you try to get creative with iframes, you will most likely still resort to JS to make the whole thing work.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Thursday September 06 2018, @03:56AM
Some js frameworks embed html snippets inside them which makes large portions of the site cacheable by the client browser.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:29AM (2 children)
Disagree. As an AC, I don't participate in moderation, but a registered user should be able to do all things a user does, including moderation, with javascript off. A minor added convenience with javascript may be ok, but it should not be a necessity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:59PM (1 child)
Feel free to contribute to the code to enable this
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @03:59PM
I might but I am allergic to Perl. Anyways, it currently works as I would like, so there is nothing to "enable".
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:20AM
It's the _original_ first-gen iPad running iOS 5 or so.
The "+" single-post disclosure buttons don't work on it.
However they "++" thread disclosure buttons work just fine.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:13PM (1 child)
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.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06 2018, @12:56PM
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.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:33PM
It is not Javascript's fault, but the abuse of it by marketeers. I use JS to make my own website's navigation work nicely and several other small bells and whistles. That way it doesn't look like 1995. But no adds, no cookies, no cross-site rubbish. News sites are a mess, sucking in tons of third party code that imports more third-third party code, the alert list lights up like a Christmas tree listing 30+ sites wanting to join the cookie party, etc. Somehow we need to fix this aspect of the Internet.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05 2018, @09:39PM
Most of this electricity wasting is being done by people who claim to care about the environment. It is the biggest hypocracy of today. Its something like 5 kWH per GB. The accumulated waste of cnn, nyt, etc that always rant about global warming is nuts:
https://www.emergeinteractive.com/insights/detail/does-irresponsible-web-development-contribute-to-global-warming [emergeinteractive.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday September 06 2018, @01:17AM
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]