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Big Fat Websites (2021)

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#51

Post by spicybright »

josephg wrote: post #32
Dave3of5 wrote: post #28

Most of the JS on a blog site will be analytics, don't hate the playa ...

Why not hate the player? I loaded an article the other day, and before I could read a single word the page had two popovers - one asking about cookies and the other asking if I wanted to join their mailing list, “So you can read more great content like this!”. Terrible websites make me angry and then get closed. What a horrible waste of our collective human potential.

Somewhat agree, but the game puts websites in a very tough place.

If you're depending on writing articles for income, either you do the dark patterns and scrape by, or you run out of money and close shop.

For news reports it's even worse because there's heavy incentive to use low quality sources for your posts.

I hate proposing yet another subscription service, but it would be much more bearable for everyone to have a netflix style model.

Flat rate a month in exchange for free access to quality news and content without the dark patterns.

I'm certinaly not holding my breath on that happening though.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#52

Post by Dave3of5 »

josephg wrote: post #32
Dave3of5 wrote: post #28

Most of the JS on a blog site will be analytics, don't hate the playa ...

Why not hate the player? I loaded an article the other day, and before I could read a single word the page had two popovers - one asking about cookies and the other asking if I wanted to join their mailing list, “So you can read more great content like this!”. Terrible websites make me angry and then get closed. What a horrible waste of our collective human potential.

Then create a blog without using any of this tech and you'll soon realise it goes nowhere.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#53

Post by jasonshaev »

grishka wrote: post #46
fleddr wrote: post #22

"Text is small" so a website should be extremely light in resources is a really simplistic way to go about things. Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page, they're part of a CMS with a million other capabilities. Or, the team creating the website was under cost pressure and went for some performance-compromised "good enough" solution. Or, the website is old (true for almost all of them) and no longer under s…

A CMS, fundamentally, is a server application that pulls things out of the database, puts them into templates, and spits the resulting HTML out to the browser. There is no inherent reason why a page that comes out of a feature-rich CMS has to be bloated.

Under that definition of a CMS I agree, however I think what you are describing is an MVP of a CMS that would require additional features and (likely) bloat to truly be useful to most publications.

Examples:

  Social Media integrations
  Subscriptions integration
  Advertisements + trackers (which will likely pull in additional garbage)
  Analytics (GA, etc.)
  Comment section + moderation tools
  Media: images, videos
  Font(s)
  Responsiveness
It CAN all add up fast unless someone is keeping track and responsible for keeping these sites lean.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#54

Post by LordDragonfang »

D13Fd wrote: post #39

I agree with the sentiment, but "stock photos" are not a problem. They add visual interest and allow the reader to quickly see what the article is about. Having a good stock photo with a blog post drastically increases the number of clicks. Yes they can be used incorrectly, but that's true of anything.

I found it particularly ironic given he specifically used the example of Harry Potter, "a pretty thick book" being only "about 500kb of text", despite the fact that the actually book (the physical object he specifically picks as his metaphor) has pictures at the start of every chapter, not to mention the custom fonts and typesetting. You would need way more than 500kb to represent the actual book.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#55

Post by hypertele-Xii »

dncornholio wrote: post #38
FridayoLeary wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autoplay videos blinking ads and basically any dynamic content have no place on a text-based website.

Autoplay videos have no place on any website. If my blog needs a video or dynamic content, it's not up to you to decide ;).

It'd be rather inconvenient if YouTube didn't autoplay the video I just clicked. It'd be tedious to have to click play every time.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#56

Post by throwaway4220 »

TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #49

Minimalism is "subtract until it breaks" and this is reaching the breaking point. Of course, we all hate popovers, slow websites etc, we've known this for decades. This website has no identity other than an emoji and the fact that it's purposefully lacking design beyond basic text styling. It looks like 1000 other sites, at a glance I can't tell what this website or article are about. And there are still elements I w…

Well, HN has many of these elements but is unique. Maybe a maverick? Also, bit unfair there is no exclamation after subscribe.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#57

Post by LordDragonfang »

TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #49

Minimalism is "subtract until it breaks" and this is reaching the breaking point. Of course, we all hate popovers, slow websites etc, we've known this for decades. This website has no identity other than an emoji and the fact that it's purposefully lacking design beyond basic text styling. It looks like 1000 other sites, at a glance I can't tell what this website or article are about. And there are still elements I w…

>This website has no identity other than an emoji

Assuming you mean the little running guy composed of unicode characters (and the bear face in the link at the bottom), the actual term is kaomoji. Emoji are specifically little images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#Japanese_(kaomoji)

http://kaomoji.ru/en/

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#58

Post by giantrobot »

noisymemories wrote: post #7
dncornholio wrote: post #3

every website should load fast. If they should be clean is something that's too subjective IMO.

I'm fully aware I'm a rather mediocre frontend developer so my opinion on the matter has very little value, but on the other hand I have this feeling that HTML, CSS and JS on the hindsight were probably some of the least suitable technological choices for what the current usage of the web actually needs to achieve this objective.

The triad of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are actually fantastic for the web if used intelligently. Unfortunately the "used intelligently" part is skipped way more often than it should be.

Having HTML be the first resource at a URL is awesome. HTML can have lots of "invisible" metadata for a variety of user agents. Not every user agent is a graphical browser wanting to run arbitrary code. The microbrowsers that generate previews when shared by messaging apps have different needs than a graphical desktop browser which has different needs than a screen reader. The same HTML can serve all the user agents "for free".

Sticking styling and interactivity into separate resources let's the user agent figure out what it needs to load. A screen reader likely doesn't care about images, a phone might load a custom CSS based on a media tag, and a microbrowser wants the OpenGraph data in the header.

HTML also makes it trivial to point readers to different sections of itself so a user agent can jump to a relevant part of the page. So you get hyperlinks between documents and even specific sections of documents.

HTML is not perfect but it's great for documents. Even full JavaScript apps should at least provide a skeleton of HTML saying they need JavaScript to run and give non-graphical user agents pointers to appropriate resources. Much of the content of the web would work just fine as documents and does not need to be constructed on the client with megabytes of JavaScript and hundreds of calls to different resources.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#59

Post by csw-001 »

D13Fd wrote: post #39

I agree with the sentiment, but "stock photos" are not a problem. They add visual interest and allow the reader to quickly see what the article is about. Having a good stock photo with a blog post drastically increases the number of clicks. Yes they can be used incorrectly, but that's true of anything.

I won't read articles on cybersecurity if I don't see a either a bad guy in a hoodie hunched over a laptop, or (even better) a neon blue padlock in front of a Matrix style screen saver. Those are the dead give-away that an article is worth your time, otherwise it's really anybody's guess as to the content quality.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#60

Post by [deleted] »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #57
TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #49

Minimalism is "subtract until it breaks" and this is reaching the breaking point. Of course, we all hate popovers, slow websites etc, we've known this for decades. This website has no identity other than an emoji and the fact that it's purposefully lacking design beyond basic text styling. It looks like 1000 other sites, at a glance I can't tell what this website or article are about. And there are still elements I w…

>This website has no identity other than an emoji Assuming you mean the little running guy composed of unicode characters (and the bear face in the link at the bottom), the actual term is kaomoji . Emoji are specifically little images. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#Japanese_(kaomoji) http://kaomoji.ru/en/

[deleted]
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