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The web sucks if you have a slow connection

danluu.com

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Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#461

Post by milesrout »

iLoch wrote: post #16

> 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…

>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?"

More like 'why shouldn't we allow people on our streets?' Which is a good question. It's a question we answered. With a yes.

>I look forward to WebAssembly and other advancements that allow us to treat the web as we once treated desktop environments, at the expense of human readability.

If you want to make a desktop programme, make a desktop programme. Don't ruin the web.

At my job, I work on a web app. It runs only on Android devices through a web view in a native app. It could have been a native app, and would have felt more natural on an Android device, been faster, and probably more secure too.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#462

Post by milesrout »

angry-hacker wrote: post #457
joeyh wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time, you had to load 2+ mb of data to see a 140 character tweet. Twitter actually recently fixed this; the tweet text is available in the title now, so will be available very early in page load. Not only does this make twitter usable on dialup again (it was effectively unusable ever since they switched from a simple html page to a massive "application" that you have to re-download every time they deploy),…

I love that they are keen on holding compatibility with archaic SMS but not so much with slower connections.

1. SMS isn't archaic.

2. 140-char limit isn't about SMS.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#463

Post by milesrout »

dragonwriter wrote: post #277
btschaegg wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with others here that dial-up-friendly sites don't "collide" with complex web-apps (thus rendering this argument somewhat void), I sadly think the underlying problem is much more mundane: Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Same reason. No one wants to pay the additional costs of achieving that. Practically speaking, this means that either Random Local Newspaper…

> Why are word processors not orders of magnitudes faster than two decades ago? Because even in the 1990s, word processors weren't orders of magnitude slower than the person sitting at the keyboard, which is the ultimate limiting factor on word processing speed.

I very frequently had to sit and wait for my word processor to catch up when typing quickly, well into the mid-2000s.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#464

Post by milesrout »

zeveb wrote: post #82
iLoch wrote: post #16

> 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 cost however, in supporting people so far behind as to only be able to serve them text is quite frankly unmanageable. 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…

HTML is certainly not a 'terrible but acceptable markup language'. Used properly, it's a _fine_ markup language. CSS is brilliant, at least in its original incarnations: it's bloated beyond repair now.

Javascript, the DOM, yeah agreed.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#465

Post by milesrout »

SquareWheel wrote: post #176
zeveb wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost however, in supporting people so far behind as to only be able to serve them text is quite frankly unmanageable. 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 a web of hyperlinked documents. The web used to be a web of hyperlinked documents. This has not been the case for a long time now. Webapps have evolved to enable widespread communication, collaboration, gaming, social media, and so much more. It's the single-largest open platform that's available from nearly any device in the world. It's a little more than a document viewer.

'Web apps' are still irrelevant to the mainstream web user. Unless you think that Facebook counts as a 'web app'. Facebook is a great example of a website that very much feels like a website: it's full of hyperlinks.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#466

Post by milesrout »

minikites wrote: post #14
Filligree wrote: post #7

Not related to the contents of the article, but please add a max-width styling to your paragraphs. 40em or so is good.

I don't disagree, but your web browser doesn't need to fill your entire screen.

My browser fills however much of my screen dwm tells it to fill.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#467

Post by flukus »

tempestn wrote: post #427
flukus wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Background images and fonts are examples of things probably not needed at all. I already have fonts on my computer, I don't need yours.

I have to agree with the original comment here: > Every time a similar question is posed on HN, someone says "If the assets aren't needed, don't serve them in the first place", but this is i) unrealistic, and ii) ignores the fact that while the typical HN user may like sparsely designed, text-orientated pages with few images, this is not at all true of users in different demographics.

I think your underestimating how perceptibly slow the internet has become for a lot of people. They don't realise they're downloading 2MB of JavaScript, they don't realise what JavaScript or css are. They'll say things like "I think my computers getting old" or "I think I have a virus". More often than not this is just because they're favourite news site has become so slow and they can't articulate it any better than that. All they want to do is read their text oriented news sites with a few images.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#468

Post by CalRobert »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #377
SilasX wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's technically true, but it assumes away the core, ever-present problems: - It may not be physically possible to add enough lanes to e.g. handle everyone who would ever want to commute into L.A. - Even if that road was correctly sized, it still has to dump the traffic into the next road, through the next intersection point. If you've increased the capacity of the freeway but none of smaller road networks that the…

It isn't physically impossible to use eminent domain to seize all the property around the roads and then build 32 lane roads all over Los Angeles. That is a separate question from how stupid that is in comparison to the alternative of building higher density residential housing closer to where people work and with better mass transit. But if people don't want to do that either , you have to pick your poison. And ther…

Also, one thing that's often forgotten is that roads take up space. A lot of it. You make your roads bigger to accommodate more people, and all of your buildings wind up farther apart as a result. When buildings are farther apart you have to drive farther, meaning that everyone's journeys are longer, meaning more traffic... and on and on it goes.

14 percent of LA county (not just city!!) is parking. http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/12/parking-los-angeles-m...

I'm trying to find a better source, but at one point supposedly 59 percent of the central business district was car infrastructure (parking, roads, etc.) http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Environment/E_Casestudy/E_...

I mean, at what point do you just build a 400 square mile skid pad with nothing else there just to "alleviate traffic"? Hell, that's practically what Orange County is already.

Re: The web sucks if you have a slow connection

#470

Post by StavrosK »

curun1r wrote: post #264
gabemart wrote: post #158

Something I have had at the back of my mind for a long time: in 2017, what's the correct way to present optional resources that will improve the experience of users on fast/uncapped connections, but that user agents on slow/capped connections can safely ignore? Like hi-res hero images, or video backgrounds, etc. Every time a similar question is posed on HN, someone says "If the assets aren't needed, don't serve them…

This seems like the thing that we'd want cooperation with the browser vendors rather than everyone hacking together some JS to make it happen. If browsers could expose the available bandwidth as a media query, it would be trivial to have different resources for different connections. This would also handle the situation where the available bandwidth isn't indicative of whether the user wants the high-bandwidth experi…

Here in Greece, the internet is plenty fast (in bandwidth), but everything is far away, so there's lots of latency in opening every page. Going to the US on a trip, it's striking how much faster every website loads, there's no 300ms pause at the start anywhere.

Because I got frustrated at fat websites downloading megabytes of useless things, I decided to start an informational site about this very thing:

http://www.lightentheweb.com/

It's not ready yet, but I'm adding links to smaller alternatives to popular frameworks, links to articles about making various parts of a website (frontend and backend) faster, and will possibly add articles by people (and me) directly on the site. If anyone has any suggestions, please open an issue or MR (the site is open source):

https://gitlab.com/stavros/lighten-the-web/issues

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