I applaud you for doing this for your blog; everyone should at least do their best to slenderize their web properties. Kudos to you!
Bloated
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Re: Bloated
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious as to why you think AMP is a step to the right direction.
Because the pages load fast and are not bloated, which is the point of this article. Unfortunately Google has bound it to other questionable practices like hosting on their domain, but it’s still a step on the right direction. We need something like that plus a way to cache it on the edge servers in a portable fashion so that any CDN like Cloudflare could pick them up.
AMP is not bound to hosting on Google, Bing now has an AMP cache as well: https://blogs.bing.com/Webmaster-Blog/September-2018/Introdu...
And since you mention Cloudflare, I searched a bit and found https://www.amp.cloudflare.com/
There are problems with AMP, but Google exclusivity is not one of those problems.
Re: Bloated
#23The sad thing is that even if 100% of the people with personal websites would do the same, it probably wouldn't change much. And yeah, I'm firmly in the "this old computer should definitely render web pages if it's good enough to run video games" camp and if the people working on current browsers argue that it's complicated, with all the scrolling and JS and stuff.. Well good riddance, web of 2018 - it was absolutely…
> The sad thing is that even if 100% of the people with personal websites would do the same, it probably wouldn't change much. Why not? A significant portion of my web browsing is done on people's personal websites, since they often have cool things to share. If I'm going to get better performance on these websites, I might change my browsing preferences to favor these even more heavily.
I think part of parent's point is that you're probably in the minority. I don't have data to back this up, but I suspect that the users who make up the "long tail" of web traffic tend to visit a higher number of websites than the vast majority of users who mostly stick to the "walled gardens."
Re: Bloated
#24I love the initiative and the execution. Nice job! I feel like I'm becoming a bigger fan of brutalist web design all the time. :)
Re: Bloated
#25I think the race to make the web an application platform is responsible for this. Web features are growing every day trying to match native apps, and the media guys leverage them to make us sad. We really need to split the web stack in two somehow, differentiate consumption sites with some basic interaction from full blown applications, handle them completely separately down to the operating system integration level.…
I love my web apps - I vastly prefer them to native apps. They don't need to be installed. Are mostly sandboxed from my native OS. Are trivial to update and even more trivial to use.
I don't even kind of understand the hatred directed at giving people actual giant useful full featured application that often is on a few meg in size and can be loaded by merely visiting a URL.
Re: Bloated
#26WebP only works on ~73% of browsers ( https://caniuse.com/#feat=webp , no Firefox/Safari/Edge support), so it's a little early to switch all your images to it. MozJPEG is a good JPEG compressor.
You can use the HTML5 element to add a fallback jpeg for all browsers that don't currently support Webp
Even better: you can let your image server check the accepted formats in the request header and send webp content transparently instead of jpg. Then you don't have to change your markup at all.
Browser's don't really care about file extensions.
https://github.com/uhop/grunt-tight-sprite/wiki/Recipe:-serv...
Re: Bloated
#27With regards to the "usually a news site" part, somebody put me onto CNN's "lite" page the other day, and it's honestly a freaking joy to use. http://lite.cnn.com/en On the other hand, I think there's definitely a case to be made for rich, application-like presentation of content, when it enhances the delivery of information . For instance: http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/ The problem is th…
Umm... that page would have been way better with simple images/animations instead of animating some laggy canvas2d crap based kn my scroll position. Had they not try their page on mobile? It’s horrible.
Re: Bloated
#28I use a similar design for my website, it has been like this for like 10 years now. I still tweak some php 5 code, and things just works on some free hosting.
The problem with the web is how permissive it is, so it gets bloated, and since online advertising, this trend is still going.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
> is a computing adage which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
What bothers me is how the web is making it impossible to run on modest smartphone, or how it's burning your battery into oblivion.
There might be solutions to this, like basically pre-parsing HTML and sending the parse tree, or re-factoring HTML and css rules into something more lean, or just rebuilding a new document format from scratch that is readable by humans, like markdown as a syntax, and rendering it directly without HTML.
We're often reminded about Knuth's "95% of the time", but HTML is really a crying example of a bad designed document format, which turned into a black hole of computing complexity since JS has access to the DOM.
Frankly web development disgusts me, and I avoid it as a career path as much as I can. We rely on web browsers and search engines way too much.
Re: Bloated
#29Kudos, Fabien! Your site has been endlessly informative on my own graphics programming journey. I think you can include a donate button and maybe raise some funds toward a new laptop or nvidia turing gpu ;)
One site I use multiple times a day that I think has decent information architecture is FinViz: The Stock Screener. High resolution quotes, charts and heatmaps. Updated on intervals of a few seconds. With lots of aggregated news and blog links.
This cryptocurrency performance page is a great example. cryptowat.ch and many other tools run high cpu loads. With an emphasis on saturating the information space with real time depth of book, exchange arbitrage, analytics, etc. When all you really desire is a quick snapshot of relative price action.
Re: Bloated
#30This is why is I keep using RSS even though many people say it's dead. I even went ahead to create a curated feed [2] for Hacker News to pair with my RSS reader [3]. I stopped doing casual web browsing years ago when many web owners started to bloat their websites with an extravagant amount of ads, excessive JavaScript code, and unnecessary "enhancements" (like custom scrolling experiences and the like) . Nowadays, w…
> coming to the conclusion that slowing development time was worthy if the resulting product was performant
What I don't get is where these claims of faster development time come from. Toolkits like Qt make it way faster and easier to build UIs than trying to use HTML/CSS garbage.