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During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

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Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#41

Post by kristianp »

A related article I read yesterday lamented that 1GB of RAM isn't enough to run a graphical browser anymore (1). Sure JavaScript runs fast now, but at the cost of the code size of the average website being unnecessarily large. This is because speedy js and speedy network connectivity allows for more code, more network requests. Another example of Wirth's law.

This was the case when I got a Rapberry Pi 4 with 1GB of RAM about late 2019. You could run one tab of Chrome, but any more and it would be killed.

(1) https://log.schemescape.com/posts/hardware/farewell-to-a-net...

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#42

Post by rsch »

Oh for the time when chairs were still for sitting and PDFs were still for printing.

Restaurant websites mentioned — the majority of restaurant web sites I’ve encountered were much more annoying and difficult to read than a PDF, even on a small phone screen. Or should I say, especially on a small phone screen. Some would make a 32 inch monitor feel cramped.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#43

Post by what »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #10
joshribakoff wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing, i almost was not sure if the last part was sarcasm. Html itself was the standard, then when it got bloated we got rss. This seems like it’s not a problem of a lack of standards. It’s the company choosing not to promote it.

RSS is just a list of links to webpages, maybe with summaries. The readers generally fetch those webpages and filter out the text, but every browser has equivalent functionality now. You can do it with literally any HTML page, though some websites try to fight it (since depending on the reader, it neuters ads).

RSS feeds used to contain the full article. That changed when everyone wanted to monetize their blogs.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#44

Post by brianpan »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #15

[flagged]

"Universal design" or "design for accessibility" will give you lots of examples of constraints that are not "commonly" needed ending up having much wider application and benefiting many other people.

Some oft-cited examples are curb cuts (the sloped ramps cut into curbs for sidewalk access) and closed-captioning (useful in noisy bars or at home with a sleeping baby).

There are many examples from the web where designing with constraints can lead to broadly more usable sites- from faster loading times (mobile or otherwise) to semantic markup for readers, etc.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#45

Post by olowe »

It's stuff like this that makes me want to scurry right back into the SRE/sysadmin space. Currently back in webdev after a few years out. I just feel like I'm being a pain in the arse to comment "could just write the HTML...?".

This very article loaded 2.49MB (uncompressed) over 30 requests. It's served using Next.js (it does actually load fine with JS disabled).

Ironically this is a great opportunity for the author to have made a stronger point. It could have gone beyond the abstract desire of "going back to basics" to perhaps demo reworking itself to be served using plain HTML and CSS without any big server-side frameworks.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#46

Post by divbzero »

neilv wrote: post #40

One way to get to this is to start with almost-'94 HTML: Some Topic Some Topic Information goes here. Information goes here. Information goes here. Then add a little non-'94 CSS styling. If you decide to add an off-the-shelf wad of CSS, like Pico.css, consider hosting it alongside your HTML (rather than turning it into another third-party dependency and CDN cross-site surveillance tracker). Minified, and single-reque…

This should be every web developer’s first webpage. No npx create-react-app ... or pip install django or any other layers in between.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#47

Post by zamadatix »

Dwedit wrote: post #39
treesknees wrote: post #2

Several news sites offer text only versions. https://lite.cnn.com/ https://text.npr.org/ https://wttr.in/ More listed at https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites It’d be great if there was some standard that allowed these to be easily found, and supported on the local news sites.

I looked at a CNN "lite" article, and it includes 560KB of stuff (lots and lots of CSS declarations) in addition to the actual 11KB of article content.

While still wasteful, CSS is one of those things you can do astronomically wrong before it starts being noticeable. Case in point here: inlining 560 kb of CSS with the page and just sending it with the entire HTML file each time is only ~61 kb of actual network transfer to load the article (due to brotli encoding).

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#49

Post by cadamsdotcom »

brianpan wrote: post #44
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #15

[flagged]

"Universal design" or "design for accessibility" will give you lots of examples of constraints that are not "commonly" needed ending up having much wider application and benefiting many other people. Some oft-cited examples are curb cuts (the sloped ramps cut into curbs for sidewalk access) and closed-captioning (useful in noisy bars or at home with a sleeping baby). There are many examples from the web where designi…

Ah, this raises 2 important nuances:

- How severe is the impact, and

- How close is the default state to the constraint

Kerb cuts help everyone. Kids, the elderly, disabled people, and anyone distracted by their phone are all less likely to fall on their face and lose a tooth.

Web accessibility helps websites go from unusable for disabled people, to usable.

On the other hand, when a dev puts a website on a diet it might make it load in 50ms instead of 200ms for 99.9% of users, and load in 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes for 0.1%.

So it doesn’t impact anyone meaningfully for the site to be heavy. And for that edge case 0.1%, they’ll either leave, or stick around waiting and stab that reload button for as long as it takes to get the info they need.

As shameful as it is, web perf work has almost zero payoff except at the limit. Anyone sensible therefore has far more to gain by investing in more content or more functionality.

Re: During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

#50

Post by valadaptive »

neilv wrote: post #40

One way to get to this is to start with almost-'94 HTML: Some Topic Some Topic Information goes here. Information goes here. Information goes here. Then add a little non-'94 CSS styling. If you decide to add an off-the-shelf wad of CSS, like Pico.css, consider hosting it alongside your HTML (rather than turning it into another third-party dependency and CDN cross-site surveillance tracker). Minified, and single-reque…

I always include ``. Is that still necessary?
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