Server Side Rendering is making a big comeback these days. I think we will see a big drop in transported bytes over the wire.
The Web I Want (2018)
11–20 of 70 posts
Re: The Web I Want (2018)
#12Let's have an example of website that could be improved by reducing use of Javascript. According to the so-called "tech" company employees on HN, it's all theoretical. The web is actually just fine.
There's no problem. It's all blog post author imagination. Turn off the ad blocker.
The web advertising industry is on the side of web users. Web users are getting everything they want, and more!
Re: The Web I Want (2018)
#13The web I want has fun, interesting, healthy applications that make the world a better place to live in.
Who cares what technology is used to build it. That’s an implementation detail for us builders.
Pragmatism > Idealism
Re: The Web I Want (2018)
#14I’m not sure why that commenter who observed these claims get surfaced all the time yet nothing has changed, got flagged/downvoted. I was about to say the same thing. I’ll add a genuine question here in hopes to spur some discussion:
It is clear the web is turning into trash or is already there, depending on your view. What genuine efforts have been made to rebuild the web without starting on the web/browser? We could just start over and not allow the same things that made the web today turn to to shit.
Re: The Web I Want (2018)
#15This website says it better: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
I agree with this in principle and my own personal site is basically "just" a website, but the lack of _any_ styling to make things look just a little nicer always turned me off to this rant in particular. I am not good with CSS, but there's plenty of essentially drop-in CSS files out there that would take a text heavy barebones site like this from "basically a text file open in notepad" readability to something a normal person would actually want to read. It's so easy that there's really no excuse not to grab one and drop it in.
edit: looks like I'm not the only one, there's a collection of motherfuckingwebsite URLs floating around: https://github.com/lyoshenka/awesome-motherfucking-website
Re: The Web I Want (2018)
#16> Most websites are about delivering and exploring content. HTML is amazing for this, and you don't need JavaScript.
This is the fundamental misconception that most "get off my lawn" people like the author have, which leads to a variant of this exact post getting voted to the top here every single day.
The web is not about delivering big blobs of text and images. It may have been at one point, but we are far beyond that. Instead:
1. The web is now first and foremost an application delivery platform. The web browser is an OS. The website is an executable program.
2. The web is not a niche hobby for nerds like it was "back in the day", but a $15+ trillion global business.
The sooner you can accept both of these, the more sense everything will make. What you did as an early adopter of the internet 30 years ago is irrelevant. You are not getting that time back. The party is long over, and everything is only going to get more commercial as time goes on.
Re: The Web I Want (2018)
#17Here's an option: have a browser set up to defer all "onload" Javascript until the user clicks on something. Then you see if you want to do anything on the page. If nothing happens until you let Javascript run, the page looks silly and the user goes elsewhere.
Pages can still load CSS, so they can do formatting.
Re: The Web I Want (2018)
#18I think this is a fine ideal for some websites but not a universal truth. For example I love the plaintextsports.com website and check it near daily on my phone, and it does a perfect job. And of course I agree that there is a lot of bloat especially around marketing / tracking snippets that slow things down and don't provide the end users with any upside.
But there are also plenty of times when I don't want the minimalistic approach the author argues for. Not everything on the web needs to be the equivalent of a printed black and white pamphlet. Modern web offers so much potential for unique interactive experiences, storytelling, media sharing, etc that isn't available in print or other content mediums.
Often I want to watch high res videos, or see detailed photos that I can zoom in on and appreciate the details. I want interactive JS experiences like the wonderful ciechanow.ski explanation tools. I want dynamic pages like a tip calculator or the daily wordle or a Photoshop like webapp, that I can save and use entirely offline. Sometimes I want a heavy gif filled homage to GeoCities, or a hypertext comic that blends in micro games and animations as part of the storytelling. I might want to check out a cutting edge 3d experience that only works with a special Chrome beta flag turned on. Sure, a subset of users on old hardware might not be able to enjoy it the same, but at the same time we have more computing power and faster connetions than we've ever had before, and to not use any of it would be a waste. The web I want is full of unique and different experiences, even if they're "suboptimal" in some way.
There may be times when a SPA is heavy or unnecessary, but there are also plenty of times when it makes almost no noticeable difference to me if there's a couple extra megabytes on a blog page. If their vision or workflow is built around client-side heavy React rather than HTMX that's fine, that's what they were comfortable working with, and they were still inspired to make the site and share it with me often for free (and of course there would be tradeoffs to any other approach, like more round-trips to the server for minor interactions, or not being able to do fun page transitions, or whatever else).
Re: The Web I Want (2018)
#19Let's have an example of website that could be improved by reducing use of Javascript. According to the so-called "tech" company employees on HN, it's all theoretical. The web is actually just fine. There's no problem. It's all blog post author imagination. Turn off the ad blocker. The web advertising industry is on the side of web users. Web users are getting everything they want, and more!
This post itself offers nothing concrete to criticize; I guess you're just supposed to read it and vibe? Why did the site load 35 MB of content, what are those chat channel requests, etc etc.
Look https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852516 made the front page 5 days ago and is another blog post saying the same thing. The problem is, without actually surveying a bunch of sites and looking at what they load and why they load it we won't know where the bloat comes from. I'm not convinced that JS is the issue because a simple JSON payload response (sans TCP overhead and connection establishment) is a matter of bytes.
Re: The Web I Want (2018)
#20I feel the frustration, and the core of the frustration is that the requirements for the web were fundamentally wrong. Thus, we keep adding new things to the browser to enable new things.
The JavaScript hate is justified for large websites where you download MBs of javascript. I'm discovering that a lean JavaScript framework and streams are a much better idiom.
If I could go back in time, then I would love to long-lived sockets to be used rather than short-lived request-response.