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Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

tomdale.net

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141–150 of 263 posts

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#141

Post by dllthomas »

npsimons wrote: post #91
glesica wrote: post #6

"And most importantly: Don’t be ashamed to build 100% JavaScript applications. You may get some incensed priests vituperating you in their blogs. But there will be an army of users (like me) who will fall in love with using your app." This statement needs a huge, HUGE caveat that you should only be building 100% JavaScript apps in situations where doing so makes sense . For example, I find the new Blogger "web app" i…

Exactly; those of us "vituperating priests" who rail against JavaScript abuse are mostly complaining about things like plain text (or even text plus photos) requiring JavaScript. You want to create some whiz bang new thing that needs Turing completeness? Go to town with JavaScript. You want to require enabling a possible malware vector and chew through computer resources like they're candy just to read a few paragrap…

Entirely an aside, and not meant as criticism but merely an interesting (hopefully) point noted in passing:

If you are doing something that requires Turing-completeness, you're doing something that can't be done on real computers, because any collection of digital hardware can be represented as a (flippin' ginormous) finite state machine.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#142

Post by camus »

icebraining wrote: post #112
kansface wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should users have to click refresh for pages to load more comments or to see when someone replies to you? The fact that reddit does not do this is not evidence that it would be confusing.

Because sites that distract me from what I'm reading to tell me that there are new comments are extremely annoying. Sure, you could add, say, auto-loading for new comments when you reach the bottom of the page, or setting the message icon to orange when you get a reply, but that hardly requires a full-blown web app, it's a simple addon to a static site.

disqus deals with this issue quite well , disqus will just notify you there are new comments ,it's up to you to load them or not.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#143

Post by qu4z-2 »

ebiester wrote: post #23
__alexs wrote: post #4

"Friendly reminder that "people with JS disabled" includes those on high-latency networks, bad firewalls, and browsers you don't support." - @jcoglan https://twitter.com/jcoglan/status/370173041193406464

I've thought about this. If I have a blog or similar media site, and require javascript, I might offer a 15/month option to allow access to a text only interface and an RSS feed. No graphics, no pictures, a very simple link and text interface. And the moment I start seeing subscriptions coming in, I'll believe in progressive enhancement again. (Progressive enhancement doesn't affect me as an application developer in…

Realistically most of your readers will come through links and the like, and thus not be willing to pay a subscription.

If it were a site I frequent, I'd probably be willing to pay $3-4/month for a simple, clean, static html version (no need to remove the pictures though -- I can choose whether to load those client-side). Something like this, say: [http://mnmlist.com/unknown/] I'd only pay 15-20/month if I could get the entire web like that :)

Most likely, at 15/month I'd just not visit your site.

EDIT: PLEASE don't use the navigation from that site though. It's ... way too vertical.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#144

Post by twistedpair »

repsilat wrote: post #118
twistedpair wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been building 100% JS apps for 4 years now. With proper fragment loading, rendering optimization, and CDN usage, the apps appear to load just fast as an asp/php/jsp page (i.e. 200ms). Once the base page is loaded, page loads are instant (i.e. 10ms) smoking a non JS web app. Blogger is sadly a dog and has been for the longest time. Profiling it just now, some of the blocking JS dependencies take > 800ms to load.…

On slow connections I can sometimes only get the base html to load. No images, no external CSS or js. Extra requests for content are just asking for trouble. Worse, when I'm halfway around the world my ping is atrocious. It doesn't matter how quickly you generate your content for me, it's going to take twice as long for me to get it if you don't send it the first time I ask for it. If I click on a link on your page a…

In that case, you'd likely prefer a JS based app that used its app manifest to cache the actual moving parts (JS/images) before you headed on vacation and landed on that slow connection. Now it only makes a bare minimum of compressed RPC's to provide the page with the content to render itself. Depending on the content being rendered, you could even get an RPC down to one or two packets, much better than sending you the entire site frame over and over for a minor change (I'm looking at you classic postback driven ASP app).

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#145

Post by pkroll »

140 comments in and no mention of TurboLinks? You hit a URL, you get the content. You click a link, it just gets the body and replaces that: no reloading the CSS, or JavaScript, so content gets rendered faster. Search engines get the actual content from the URLs, users get the speed. Issues having to do with making your scripts idempotent are problematic, but it certainly sounds like a good base.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#146

Post by qu4z-2 »

Joeboy wrote: post #58

Great, I'm going to be debugging other people's websites in my spare time as well as at work.

I experienced this recently. I had to look through the source of a site because their image gallery javascript was broken.

I was already looking at a gallery of thumbnails... how hard can it be to make each thumbnail a link to the image in question, and at runtime attach a javascript handler to open the image in a pop-up or whatever?

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#147

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #130
mmastrac wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, exactly, is the issue with writing a simple content site that requires JS? If you aren't pulling in half a MB of JS, but it does require scripting to function, I don't see the problem. Just because I could spend the effort to be progressive doesn't constrain me to have to do it. It doesn't make me a lazy programmer either: just pragmatic. 99.99% of the people visiting my site have JS enabled and I'm happy to su…

"99.99% of the people visiting my site have JS enabled" Do you know that for a FACT, or are you just guessing?

To add to this, generally most user data collected is through javascript.

If you don't have javascript enabled...

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#148

Post by pekk »

antihero wrote: post #115
ris wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be fine if half the web didn't work for you? How about we say it's fine replacing text with images? We could always use alt tags for accessibility. The number of people who ever actually select/copy text from your website will be <1%, so why not just do away with it and get the text in any font we like, with any rendering style & layout we like?

Because that is an utterly ridiculous strawman. Using images for text is firstly almost entirely pointless, and has many many drawbacks that using JavaScript doesn't. For instance, it's a pain in the arse to maintain, it breaks text reflowing, it's huge, you have to deal with image compression, and it likely ruins the ability of search engines to spider your content without OCR. Not to mention that any decent screen…

Not as ridiculous as you think - a large amount of content is locked into PDFs which present effectively as images, and HTML wasn't always as dominant as it is today.

The idea that it is actively shameful to use Lynx is strange and antithetical to the way the web was originally designed - the user agent is SUPPOSED to be in control of presentation, the markup is SUPPOSED to be semantic.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#150

Post by pekk »

Pinckney wrote: post #3

I think the point that's overlooked here is that the offenders aren't the clever apps that would be impossible to write without javascript. Go ahead and write those. I'm happy for you, really. The problem is pages that require javascript to display static content. There are very few good reasons for an article, or an image gallery, or a homepage that could have been displayed just fine a decade ago to now need javasc…

The top reason to require Javascript is to enable user tracking (e.g. Google Analytics, but not just that at all).
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