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Big Fat Websites (2021)

herman.bearblog.dev

21–30 of 72 posts

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#21
post #16
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct - this is an attempt to appear fresh. But it is no excuse. It’s still an anti-user dark pattern.

Fully agree. Also you can appear fresh regardless _if you are actually fresh_, simply by adding an review/update date.

Or if you’re not, just use a cron to keep the dates fresh

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#22
"Text is small" so a website should be extremely light in resources is a really simplistic way to go about things.

Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page, they're part of a CMS with a million other capabilities. Or, the team creating the website was under cost pressure and went for some performance-compromised "good enough" solution. Or, the website is old (true for almost all of them) and no longer under serious active maintenance.

It's not just incompetence leading to technical bloat.

The same is true for some of the "dark patterns" like auto-playing videos and pop-ups. We should stop with the narrative that this is due to publication truly hating users or being completely tone-deaf. It's purposefully done because it works. It serves marketing and monetary goals.

Yes, this comes at the expense of usability. You should see it as an act of desperation that is existential. It keeps the lights on. The terrible state of web usability is due to it not having any reliable business model other than the current status quo.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#23

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the author created https://justsketch.me/ , which sponsors http://reference.sketchdaily.net/ I found these to be great resources for drawing exercises.

[deleted]

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#24

Lol the irony of this. Very slow TTFB from Australia.. over 1 second The blog is already behind Cloudflare, and this page is static content, why don't you just add a rule to cache the page?

I have 1 second to spare. Optimization is good, but shaving milliseconds at all costs always sounded a bit pointless to me, except for real-time audio communication.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#25
post #22

"Text is small" so a website should be extremely light in resources is a really simplistic way to go about things. Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page, they're part of a CMS with a million other capabilities. Or, the team creating the website was under cost pressure and went for some performance-compromised "good enough" solution. Or, the website is old (true for almost all of them) and no longer under s…

   > Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page,
   > they're part of a CMS with a million other capabilities
Why should it matter? By this token a car should weight about as much as the a factory that made it.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#26
post #11

And they have to have a publish date. (You wouldn't believe the number of blog posts that do not have one)

The irony of it is that if Google's algorithm made sense at all (Why is a recipe being downranked for being older than one year?), people wouldn't have to do all of this stuff.

It's a vicious circle and I don't know if it's possible to escape at this point by any means other than inventing a better search algorithm and convincing a large number of people to use it.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree. Also you can appear fresh regardless _if you are actually fresh_, simply by adding an review/update date.

Or if you’re not, just use a cron to keep the dates fresh

But... then what's the point of a date at all? May as well not have one.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#29

every website should load fast. If they should be clean is something that's too subjective IMO.

I'm fully aware I'm a rather mediocre frontend developer so my opinion on the matter has very little value, but on the other hand I have this feeling that HTML, CSS and JS on the hindsight were probably some of the least suitable technological choices for what the current usage of the web actually needs to achieve this objective.

There was once the idea, that the web could work like other objects in programming. You would download an object and then send it messages (message passing concept). I think this was imagined to be in some kind of Smalltalk image like environment. I think Alan Kay mentioned the idea in one of his talks, or I have read about it elsewhere related to Smalltalk.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#30
post #25
post #22

"Text is small" so a website should be extremely light in resources is a really simplistic way to go about things. Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page, they're part of a CMS with a million other capabilities. Or, the team creating the website was under cost pressure and went for some performance-compromised "good enough" solution. Or, the website is old (true for almost all of them) and no longer under s…

> Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page, > they're part of a CMS with a million other capabilities Why should it matter? By this token a car should weight about as much as the a factory that made it.

Beautiful analogy.
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