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Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

baldurbjarnason.com

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Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#31

Post by Animats »

scholia wrote: post #22
Animats wrote: post #6

From the article: "The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don’t agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and t…

I saved a Washington Post page -- a short interview -- and it came to 3054KB. I saved a NY Post page and it came to 2843K. For all I know, there could have been piles of background junk that weren't saved with the page. It does seem a bit remarkable that these sites need to ship 3 megabytes of stuff to deliver 20K of text.... I think I need your web service ;-)

If you want to try it, try

  http://www.sitetruth.com/fcgi/viewer.fcgi?url=news.ycombinator.com
replacing the URL parameter with the desired web site. It's a tool we use to see how our crawler views a page. It reads the first 1MB from a URL, converts everything to UTF-8 based on the strict rules for charsets (no guessing), parses it with a HTML5 parser to create a parse tree, throws out the Javascript and Flash, makes all the links absolute, and emits a pretty-printed version.

Most sites have readable text after this, although some features may not work. The ones that don't do something like creating the page with document.write(), or one of those "parallax" formats. It's a reasonable test to see if the web designers went completely overboard. If you're getting a blank page, search engines probably aren't indexing that page very well.

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#32

Post by pc2g4d »

omouse wrote: post #14

Mozilla needs to have a separate web browser project that only focuses on cutting out the cruft of the top 100 websites plus top 50 news sites. Filter out the ads, filter out the JS that launches advertising modals, cache the content, in short do anything to make sure they load in under 2 seconds with 1 second or 500ms the goal. When you control the client you can stop so many unnecessary requests and you can patch s…

Except this probably violates everybody's Terms of Service....

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#33

Post by webnrrd2k »

Animats wrote: post #6

From the article: "The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don’t agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and t…

I've said the same thing a few times -- life on the web would be much easier in many ways if they used html tables, but renamed it to "Grid" or "Layout" or some such.

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#34

Post by scholia »

Animats wrote: post #31
scholia wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saved a Washington Post page -- a short interview -- and it came to 3054KB. I saved a NY Post page and it came to 2843K. For all I know, there could have been piles of background junk that weren't saved with the page. It does seem a bit remarkable that these sites need to ship 3 megabytes of stuff to deliver 20K of text.... I think I need your web service ;-)

If you want to try it, try http://www.sitetruth.com/fcgi/viewer.fcgi?url=news.ycombinator.com replacing the URL parameter with the desired web site. It's a tool we use to see how our crawler views a page. It reads the first 1MB from a URL, converts everything to UTF-8 based on the strict rules for charsets (no guessing), parses it with a HTML5 parser to create a parse tree, throws out the Javascript and Flash, makes…

Many thanks, will have a play...

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#35

Post by rjaco31 »

Animats wrote: post #6

From the article: "The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don’t agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and t…

What's the difference between using your reader and simply having Javascript/Flash/etc deactivated? (beside not leaking the whole browsing history to your website & increased lantency)

Re: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web

#36

Post by rjaco31 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #30
woah wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to be the guy- but how about just serving some html and some css?

I dunno, what do you think are the reasons media sites aren't doing that? Ads? Tracking? What they think is a good design/UX that users will like, find easy and enjoyable to read, and associate with professionalism and credibility? (are they right or wrong?) Good UX for multi-media presentations? Social media sharing icons? Good UX for mobile? Comments features? Other stuff?

Basically a little bit of everything, it's just feature bloating.
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