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A faster BBC News front page

wildlyinaccurate.com

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Re: A faster BBC News front page

#111

Post by Theodores »

paulpepper wrote: post #42
wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The breaking news banner is a source of much internal conflict, at least within the engineering teams. I think most people agree that it's too big, and most people also agree that it's over-used. Unfortunately it's one of those things that editorial will not back down on — they must be able to push their breaking news to people, and it must be prominent (and therefore quite intrusive). There is a small improvement to…

Might users be given the option of disabling the breaking news feature? I don't expect that it's a straightforward yes/no.

...or maybe you could decide what you wanted as 'breaking news', so if you did not want to know the football results because you are watching the game later, then you could un-tick 'sports'.

This could be really useful for onboarding people, once onboard they could set up alerts for topics or tick 'follow this story' if for instance they read about someone being brought to trial and they wanted to know the sentencing or even what crimes get committed five years hence once the culprit is out of jail.

Things in the news and the weather could then be pushed/pulled from an app.

As well as topics for 'breaking news' there could also be a colour coded level so if you don't really care about some unknown unknowns getting droned out of existence in far-off-istan (in a 'yellow' terror threat incident) then you don't get an alert for it. Meanwhile, if you are British and some idiot kills people outside parliament then that one pops up as 'breaking news' with no hesitation.

Tsunami alerts are probably handy as 'breaking news', it would be annoying to die in some massive flood due to having turned off the 'breaking news' wholesale just because you had no interest in the French election or 'Frexit'.

I think that they need to just be a bit more imaginative with the feature so that it works for all stakeholders, the editorial department, the reads and everyone in between, up to and including No. 10.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#113

Post by nacs »

rocky1138 wrote: post #100
inimino wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't happen. Pop-ups were a specific browser API and could be easily turned off without affecting anything else, banners are just content and can't be singled out by the browsers (unless by an adblock-type arms race).

Machine learning will probably be used to learn the traits of pop-up content and block it with a given confidence value.

And as soon as that starts becoming common, programmers will implement workarounds that avoid AI detection.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#114

Post by Chris86 »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #21
afandian wrote: post #11

Can you ditch the 'breaking news' whilst you're at it too please? It's never really 'breaking' and is usually the headline of the landing page anyway. Usability wise, it's as bad as a pop-up ad. Like this, for example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu_KsFAWgAADCJR.png

The breaking news banner is a source of much internal conflict, at least within the engineering teams. I think most people agree that it's too big, and most people also agree that it's over-used. Unfortunately it's one of those things that editorial will not back down on — they must be able to push their breaking news to people, and it must be prominent (and therefore quite intrusive). There is a small improvement to…

Is there no way you can at least track that a user has already been exposed to the breaking news (banner or article etc) and stop re-showing it? I always see it after I've already hit the homepage, seen the 'breaking news' and then gone to somewhere else on the site and then 'breaking news' banner all over again.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#115

Post by Paul_S »

It's nice someone cares about performance in modern websites. Shame about the BBC being no better than any other clickbait website as far as news goes. Truly, my licence fee well spent.

I never understood that. Surely, since you're already paid for you could just report the news and not bother with clickbait since you're not getting paid for the clicks?

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#116

Post by yitchelle »

DanBC wrote: post #76
nailer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if editorial thinks it matters and you think it makes things worse? Act like engineers, work out what you want, test it and get some damn data on it.

You're downvoted because you display ignorance of what it's like to work within a huge rigid bureaucracy where "just test it" mostly can't happen.

Wait..He got downvoted because he showed a lack of knowledge? HN is better than that. Is he trolling?

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#117

Post by acdha »

DamonHD wrote: post #94
acdha wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question you should be asking is why it's there: is saving an extra nanosecond or two of easily-cached compression time really worth having to rearchitect a backend templating or content assembly system? It's not a bad thing to do but I'd be surprised if they didn't have higher priorities for their engineering staff. If you look at the trace I linked before, note that even if you could eliminate all of the time t…

Most of the work would be essentially quick and one-off: no one blinks at minifying JS or CSS and I bet that 50% of this would be entirely the same and at low dev cost. I entirely see your point, but disagree that it's not worth doing any of it, given an almost certain quick small win + saving CPU time and bandwidth and a bit of planet while we're at it!

> Most of the work would be essentially quick and one-off:

Again, think about the complexity of what's generating that content. Do you really think they have a single index.html template floating around rather than the system described pulling blocks of content in from various sources, all of which need to be updated in various places? You could build a system to collapse whitespace runs after the content is generated but now you need to develop that and test it to make sure it doesn't trigger on something where the whitespace actually matters … and suddenly you're taking time away from changes which actually benefit people.

> given an almost certain quick small win + saving CPU time and bandwidth and a bit of planet while we're at it!

How much CPU time do you think you're talking about, anyway? Here's what doing this in a naive manner which will break things looks like:

    cadams@jupiter:~ $ gzip -9
So we're talking an extremely small amount of CPU time and one packet saved. That's might seem useful until you look at this in context of a page which loads a couple MB of content and uses multiple seconds of CPU time:

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/170424_NT_W4S/

Image compression, enabling gzip on the remaining resources which lack it, etc. are all going to save more data on individual files and have the nice property of not breaking anything else.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#118

Post by samscully »

inimino wrote: post #77
malza wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reminds me of the early 2000s when websites would initiate a pop-up ad and the first thing I would do is automatically close it without looking. Thankfully browser makers stepped in and blocked them automatically. That's my hope. That news outlets will spam the feature so much that web browsers will make it easy to switch them off.

Won't happen. Pop-ups were a specific browser API and could be easily turned off without affecting anything else, banners are just content and can't be singled out by the browsers (unless by an adblock-type arms race).

Recently working on an embeddable shopping widget I noticed that if I animated it in certain ways chrome would block it as a popup.

Doesn't contradict what you said I just thought it was interesting that chrome doesn't just look for the most basic types of pop-ups.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#119

Post by UnquietTinkerer »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #22
afandian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious? This is how the current homepage renders for me. http://imgur.com/a/8pDS0 And the new one is even worse (though it's a work-in-progress) http://imgur.com/a/IPr3U

Wow, this is awful. Would you mind telling me what combination of settings/add-ons you have so that we can reproduce this? Our "no JS" fallback styles are not done in a very nice way at the moment: they rely on the browser reading noscript tags. We never did any testing with NoScript or similar add-ons, and I remember hearing somewhere that those sort of add-ons don't always evaluate noscript tags.

I found that the "new" site looks reasonable with javascript completely disabled (i.e. turn it off in the browser settings). The problem appears to be when using a plugin to selectively restrict javascript (I use uMatrix) - in this case, the browser apparently doesn't interpret tags. This is unfortunate, but I think its more of a bug/limitation in the script blocking plugins than a problem with your design.

Re: A faster BBC News front page

#120

Post by smichel17 »

noir_lord wrote: post #99
SippinLean wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just realized that wasn't an ad; I've never read the text because the placement/intrusiveness triggered my ad blindness, I've blocked it with ublock as well.

Aye, I use Ublock Origin to block more than just ads. It's also handy for the comment sections on newspapers, sections of news sites you are never gonna click/read (in my case sport) and comments on youtube.

I block the suggested videos sidebar on youtube, too.
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