11–20 of 237 posts
I honestly thought this attitude had died out with everything being Vue and React and all that I used Huel's site earlier and it even had a splash overlay saying what it was loading, it was one reticulating splines away from being The Sims Edit: ah it was posted in 2016, I don't think anyone (but do wish) cares about limiting their JS usage anymore
i care, plenty of other people care.
It's been thus, nigh on two decades now. Product Designer: "No system controls; we want our users to have the Full Brand Experience, therefore, custom controls." Also Product Designer: "Why don't our custom controls work as well as system controls?"
It's been thus, nigh on two decades now. Product Designer: "No system controls; we want our users to have the Full Brand Experience, therefore, custom controls." Also Product Designer: "Why don't our custom controls work as well as system controls?"
We created this problem ourselves by not having the tools to meet designer needs while doing it right. Pontificating about how they should just change their notion of right misses it completely.
It doesn't help if like Eevee you do have an account and are actually tweeting, but if all you're doing is browsing then it runs completely Javascript-free.
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In regards to the actual content of the article, it's an eye-opening experience to dig into how a lot of these pages are constructed and to realize that sites like Google search, Facebook, Twitter are not really designed around having the simplest most performant implementations.
There is some dark eldritch magic that happens behind the scenes on a lot of these sites that keeps them working with accessibility readers and nothing else: trying to make it harder to find hrefs, trying to get rid of right-click open in new tab commands, trying to make it impossible for browser extensions to identify parts of the HTML. And I think it's really easy at first to say, "this is a complicated problem we don't understand, of course this must be a super-performant hyper-optimized way of doing everything." But it just becomes harder and harder to justify that over time. The link wrapping that Google search does really doesn't have anything to do with performance, it's designed to close holes around how people open links without sending pingbacks to Google servers.
There is a real incentive battle between tracking/control and simplicity/performance/flexibility, and the performance side doesn't always win, it seems that big companies are actually willing to introduce a huge amount of engineering complexity for an outcome that's almost as good as a normal href but that allows them to accomplish other goals as well.
The level of complexity in these sites sometimes gets used as an excuse to avoid criticism, but I think that sometimes the complexity is there purely because sites are actually fighting with browser technology; Google's setup for link wrapping is very complicated, Twitter's text entry is very complicated, because they're trying to take control of a process that they don't normally have control over. So they build very complicated houses of cards that fall over in weird situations, and the complexity of the house of cards becomes the defense against criticism that the house of cards keeps falling over.
I look at projects like Nitter; Nitter is not a full Twitter replacement, but in regards to the parts of Twitter that it does replace, it's better engineered. It's less complicated, the engineering is less impressive, but impressive engineering is not the same thing as good engineering. For the features it's replicating, Nitter works better than the real thing, and I think the reason is that it's less complicated and that it's fighting less with the browser.
Quoted post unavailable.
I know this is likely to be controversial, but JS improves the user experience a lot, both in terms of interaction and speed, as well as making development more manageable (if used correctly), alas at the expense of annoying purists who would prefer to enagage in all sorts of CSS/HTML gymnastics just to avoid using JS (and other kinds that would prefer vanilla JS to frameworks). Do that in a large project and you'll…
> I think the Web is great, I think interactive dynamic stuff is great, and I think the progress we’ve made in the last decade is great. I also think it’s great that the Web is and always has been inherently customizable by users, and that I can use an extension that lets me decide ahead of time what an arbitrary site can run on my computer.
> What’s less great is a team of highly-paid and highly-skilled people all using Chrome on a recent Mac Pro, developing in an office half a mile from almost every server they hit, then turning around and scoffing at people who don’t have exactly the same setup.
And later on:
> I’m not saying that genuine web apps like Google Maps shouldn’t exist — although even Google Maps had a script-free fallback for many years, until the current WebGL version! I’m saying that something has gone very wrong when basic features that already work in plain HTML suddenly no longer work without JavaScript. 40MB of JavaScript, in fact, according to about:memory