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The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk

211–220 of 283 posts

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#211
post #29
post #16

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Yes, this is an example of government design systems, which are becoming popular among developed countries: - The UK: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ - The US: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ - Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html - Argentina: https://argob.github.io/poncho/ - Italy: https://designers.italia.it/ - Singapore: https://www.designsystem.tech.gov.sg/ - Estonia: http…

- Russia: http://gov.design/

Is this a parody? Knockoff? Why is a Russian government site on an English domain name under some random tld?

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#212

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.au used to be third-level only too (or fourth-level in places, e.g. *.vic.edu.au for the state of Victoria), with careful rules about each, including things like requiring that the name match your business/whatever, trademark, or something your business sells or does (which eliminates the vast majority of squatting in theory without the additional “no squatting” rule, and in practice there wasn’t much, and also ensu…

A bit of internet trivia is the oz.au domain. In the late 1980s, the Australian universities were connected in a network with names ending .oz. When the TLD .au arrived, .oz was renamed .oz.au. So my email address at Elec Engineering at Melbourne University was @ee.mu.oz.au. And then a few years later, the third-level structure got formalised. Melbourne Uni, for instance, switched from mu.oz.au to unimelb.edu.au. I f…

Yeah, those old *.mu.oz.au subdomains seem to have steadily disappeared. When my eldest brother was there somewhere around 2005–2010 Computer Science were still actively using cs.mu.oz.au (I think all their email and web stuff was still there), but even that seems to have lost its A records now, though it’s still got a third, interesting NS record (compared to ee.mu.oz.au which has only two boring NS records, edns-*.unimelb.net.au), mulga.cs.mu.oz.au, which is still talking A.

Another bit of historical trivia that now becomes mundane: csiro.au.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#213
post #41

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They all use this design system: https://design-system.service.gov.uk . It's much more than just a CSS framework, it's full specifications on how to implement easy to follow and sensible UX. I wish there was more buy in by local councils of this system, there are some incredibly poor local government sites.

> I wish there was more buy in by local councils of this system, there are some incredibly poor local government sites. You may be interested in Local Gov Drupal. Unfortunately they've defined themselves around a specific tool, rather than a design library, but maybe that was what it took to get them to come together. Seven councils are using the solution, and around 30 councils are involved in the initiative, but th…

Yikes. Drupal is complex enough to be a government in its own right. Stay far far far far FAR away from it and any company or agency that demands its use. It's an overengineered nightmare of opaque idiosyncrasies.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#214
post #154

The team at gov.uk is doing an excellent job regarding web performance, credit where credit is due. In many ways role model behavior. Still, the results are such a stretch as to not have that much meaning. They have to descent all the way to 2G to see any meaningful difference, and I'm assuming they are cold visits (typical in lab-based testing). For those exceptional users, this creates a difference from very poor (…

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Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#215

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Seems like the writer hasn't heard about the trick of putting js at the bottom of the page, or the async html5 tag. Looks like the had jquery in the head section on every page. That's not really jquery or javascript's fault.

The writers are Matt Hobbs and Andy Sellick, respectively Head of Frontend Development and Senior Frontend Developers at GDS. They may have considered alternative options. Here's a previous article explaining why they did what they did: https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/11/how-and-why-we-re...

That article doesn't address the point raised: their placement of jquery in the head of page was likely the cause of the performance issues more than the presence of jquery.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#217

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> They have to descent all the way to 2G to see any meaningful difference Somewhat shockingly according to https://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/news/cw-journal/why-2g-w... 12% of mobile network connections in the UK are still on 2G? That's surprisingly high usage, and would definitely be worth optimizing. Although usage that high would then explain why 2G shutdown is still 10 years(!) away for the UK. Phones still on…

I wouldn’t read too much into 2G figures meaning 2G-only phones (or 3G). In my experience once you get out of populated areas connections often drop to 2G, even on my 5G capable iPhone. It’s mostly a coverage issue not a handset issue.

That's somewhat surprising. The US, which has plenty of rural areas with cell coverage, phased out 2G basically entirely over the past few years (only T-Mobile has a 2G network at all in the US now, and it's due to be sunset at the end of the year) Heck the US's 3G networks are all shutdown already, too, except for Verizon which is due to be turned off at the end of the year. Canada, also no stranger to rural areas, also has a complete shutdown of the 2G network. What's the struggle with UK getting 4G/LTE coverage out to those areas? Just no investment?

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#218
post #154

The team at gov.uk is doing an excellent job regarding web performance, credit where credit is due. In many ways role model behavior. Still, the results are such a stretch as to not have that much meaning. They have to descent all the way to 2G to see any meaningful difference, and I'm assuming they are cold visits (typical in lab-based testing). For those exceptional users, this creates a difference from very poor (…

Exactly. It was cute for a few years, but these jQuery bashing thoughtpieces are so worn out now. As React and the long tail of frameworks slides into it's twilight years, it's clear in retrospect that jQuery was just a much more responsible and sound architecture (mostly because it cleaved to standards) than any of the things that spawned the 1000 "why I'm leaving jQuery for _this_" blogposts every day.

You can improve website performance by replacing jQuery with vanilla JS. That's a statement of fact, not a "jQuery bashing thoughtpiece".

Several years ago, jQuery was practically a requirement, but now vanilla JS offers many of the same features. There's a huge amount of older websites that relied upon jQuery but don't really need it anymore.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#219
post #135
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, the Germans, of all people, don’t have a standard government design system? Next you’re going to say the Swiss also don’t have one, and I’ll have to throw out my entire set of national stereotypes!

It's not entirely surprising. Germany is a federal republic, somewhat similar to the US, with some degree of autonomy for its member states. Switzerland is a confederacy.

This needs correcting. Germany and Switzerland are both federal states, they occupy the same spot on the notional spectrum. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/The_path...> The comment would have a point if either state was unitary, but this is not the case.

Switzerland was a confederation prior to 1848, the now inaccurate name stuck for I assume sentimental reasons. The issue of republics is orthogonal to the topic under discussion.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> jQuery is largely not needed since Internet Explorer lost market share and there's less of a need to have lots of workarounds for it. As someone who's late to the webdev party I feel that jQuery is pretty awesome (all I ever heard is people poopoo it). The vanilla API for the DOM manipulation is just plainly awful and borderline nonsensical so I'd say jQuery is still very much needed.

If you are mainly using jquery for its DOM manipulation¹ rather than for browser compatibility² or things that didn't exist consistently in older browsers³ then there are much smaller libraries that do that job which may be worth looking into. https://github.com/fabiospampinato/cash or https://github.com/franciscop/umbrella to give a couple of examples. Some explicitly support IE11 so you are not dropping as much sup…

Thank you for the recommendations - cash looks awesome and more than enough for most of my projects!
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