81–90 of 622 posts
One thing I wonder about is, it seems many dialup ISPs these days provide some kind of "accellerator", probably a web proxy that avoids some of the issues with timeouts, perhaps compresses some content etc. So it might be that many of the remaining dialup users don't experience quite as many problems as Dan found.
> Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" > Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands…
No, no it's not, it's really not. You're already writing your SPAs with a REST backend, right? Well, guess what: static HTML & REST go together like burgers & beer! All you need to do is add an HTML content renderer to your REST backend, and you have _something_ someone can use to interact with.
> The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications. Some people like to think of the web as just hyper text, and everything on it should be human parse-able. For me, as someone who has come late to the game, it has never seemed that way. The web is where I go to do things: work, learn, consume, watch, play. It's a tool that allows me to access the interfaces I use in my daily life.
True fact: learning, consuming & watching are all well-supported by static HTML.
> But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me.
Part of the problem is that we're not advancing technologically: we're getting bogged down in the La Brean morass which is modern web development. HTML is a terrible but acceptable markup language; CSS is an ugly but somewhat acceptable styling language; the DOM is as hideous as a Gorgon; JavaScript is approximately the worst language ever; the combination of all the above is grotesque, and an ongoing indictment of our entire industry.
A cross-platform application-distribution standard sounds pretty awesome, but that's not what web pages are supposed to be, and it's not what web browsers should deliver. The web is a web of hyperlinked documents. It's right there in its name. And anyone who demands that his readers enable a somewhat cross-platform, highly insecure, privacy-devouring application-distribution tool in order to read his text is welcome to take a long walk off of a short pier.
> Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" > Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands…
Horses on highways would cause accidents. I have yet to see a fast-moving web page crash in to a slow-moving one and shut down the router. Analogies work better when there is connective tissue between the concepts in play.
More generally, the vast bulk of the problem is not human readability or interactivity over http, but more a matter of insane amounts of unnecessary gunk being included in web pages because of faulty assumptions about the width of pipes.
More generally, I find myself moving in the opposite direction. I find that many SaaS services' interests don't align with mine, so I'm going back to local applications. I don't trust others with most of my data, so the only service that sees much of it only sees encrypted blobs (for offsite backup). I've always run my own mail, and have slowly been expanding the services I host as I bring more of this stuff in-house. And so on. But I realize I'm in a minority.
But the nice thing is that it gives me an intranet and "other" grouping that is very straightforward, so that the browser instances that touch untrusted (not-mine) services can run in "bastion" VM, locked down nicely and reset to a pristine state at will, not to mention allowing some stupid networking tricks that are sometimes useful.
> Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection? Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That's like asking "why shouldn't we allow horses on our highways?" > Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript. No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands…
The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications. No, it's not. Yes, there are MMORPGs that run in the browser using WebGL.[1] But very, very few pages use all that capability. Most web pages today would work just fine in HTML 3.1. And what is this thing with running over ten trackers on one page? [1] http://www.webglgames.com/
Most webpages today that would work fine in HTML 3.1 aren't built as massive JS web apps. If they are, it may serve a purpose (better UI/UX for most of their users being a major one.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.
> You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. And you'll be more secure, and you'll retain more of your privacy. I find 'this site requires JavaScript' to be another way of saying, 'the authors of this site don't care about you, your security or your privacy, and will gladly sell all three to the highest bidder.'
Not related to the contents of the article, but please add a max-width styling to your paragraphs. 40em or so is good.
I found out this the hard way. T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem. While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exce…
Disable JavaScript. You’ll be surprised at how most of the web still works and is much faster. Longer battery life on mobile, too.
Still using them for the side effects. Its nice to be able to start reading an article immediately without waiting for the jumping around of content to stop. And actually read until the end without having modal dialogs shoven down my the throat.
I found out this the hard way. T-Mobile used to offer 2G internet speeds internationally in 100+ countries included in Simple Choice subscriptions. 2G is limited to 50 kbit/s, that's slower than a 56K modem. While this absolutely fine for background processes (e.g. notifications) and even checking your email, most websites never loaded at these speeds. Resources would time out, and the adverts alone could easily exce…
Yeah when I used to run over my T-Mobile data allotment (in the US) and they dropped me to whatever speed they throttle you to when your "high speed" data is gone, Google Maps wouldn't load, Facebook wouldn't load, YouTube wouldn't load. I remember using all of those things back in the days when a 3G connection was a luxury, back when Windows was the best smartphone platform. What happened between then and now that s…
Single Page Applications with dozens of MB of Javascript, Google AMP (which has a JS runtime taking several minutes to load on 2G), and so on.