> Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail. After refreshing the page twice, the page loaded as it was supposed to and I was able to read the blog post, a fairly compelling post on eliminating dependencies.
slow clap
His data on steve-yegge.blogspot.com is particularly unfortunate: Steve's (excellent) posts are almost completely pure text, and there's no reason for them to fail to download or display, except that Google demands that one execute JavaScript in order to get a readable page.
> if you’re browsing from Mauritania, Madagascar, or Vanuatu, loading codinghorror once will cost you more than 10% of the daily per capita GNI.
Maybe the social-justice angle can convince some people to shed their megabytes of JavaScript and embrace clean, simple, static pages? There's probably some kid in rural Ethiopia who might have been inspired to create great things, if only he'd been able to read Steve Yegge's blog.
> The “ludicrously fast” guide fails to display properly on dialup or slow mobile connections because the images time out.
slow clap
> Since its publication, the “ludicrously fast” guide was updated with some javascript that only loads images if you scroll down far enough.
Incidentally, is there any way we can enforce the death penalty against people who load images with JavaScript? HTML already has a way to load images in a page: it's the element. I shouldn't be required to hand code execution privileges over to any random site on the Internet in order to view text or images.