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The Web I Want (2018)

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Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#31

Post by Karrot_Kream »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #27
paxys wrote: post #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 t…

This is true. But applications can be small and performant. It takes skill, time, and work; a hard sell, these days. Nowadays, we can throw together two or three massive dependencies, and get a really high-tone app. That waddles like an overfed walrus.

I think it's worth asking why, which I guess is less fun than complaining. Are the frameworks too fat? Do they encourage wasteful network requests? Are things not being compressed? Do developers not understand how to incrementally ask for data?

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#32

Post by quechimba »

h43z wrote: post #11

Server Side Rendering is making a big comeback these days. I think we will see a big drop in transported bytes over the wire.

I've been working on a React-inspired framework in Ruby [1,2]. It only requires a few kilobytes of JavaScript, and only includes the relevant stylesheets for each page. Works pretty well and I guess I'm in a rural area (about 90 minutes down the river from Iquitos, Peru) on a 4G connection.

I recently did another experiment [3] where each static DOM tree becomes a custom element, which also reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred.

I should probably make a Show HN post soon...

1. https://github.com/mayu-live/framework

2. https://mayu.live/

3. https://github.com/aalin/rdom

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#35

Post by gregw134 »

naet wrote: post #18

I 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 mini…

Agreed. Sorry for piggybacking off your post, but I'm trying to build a search engine, and one thing I want to surface are interactive websites. Does anyone have suggestions for Javascript features I could extract that might indicate a site is doing something cool/interactive? I'm not a frontend developer--keywords I have now are .wasm, webhooks, WebGL, canvas.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#36

Post by noahtallen »

enos_feedler wrote: post #14

I’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 coul…

I think there are a lot of huge misconceptions about modern web dev in posts like these. The part of the internet that’s trash is pretty much anything related to ad tech (and therefore tracking). But this is also what funds basically the entire web. Probably the best thing about the web is how accessible it is — you can use it for free if you can find an internet connection. Plus, its inherit flexibility makes it a very powerful platform. These together make it incredibly popular, but also make it ripe for abuse, and make advertisements a requirement as long as people don’t want to pay.

But the takeaway from these posts seems to be “JavaScript is bad.” This completely misses the point — anyone with, say, a recipe site strewn with ads and newsletter popups is doing so for the money. If people were willing to pay for recipes online, maybe things would be different. But the core economic model of most websites is to use ads to let it be free. You can’t change the UX around these types of sites without changing the economics. (Though some, like Brave, have tried.)

Media companies can and do build minimal feeds (lite.cnn.com), but they’d never allow that to be the default since it doesn’t make any money.

IMO, these conversations need to talk less about the tech (which isn’t super relevant — you can make plain HTML shitty too with enough ads), and more about the economics of the internet.

And if we’re talking about niche hobby and personal sites, people just use whatever tool they want because they’re experimenting and having fun. Being fast and efficient isn’t always the goal for someone playing around in their free time.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#37

Post by andrewfong »

At this point, I feel like the party best equipped to reduce JavaScript bloat are the web browsers themselves.

There's the obvious stuff, like simply blocking third party tracking JS.

There's some small quality of life bits -- a non-trivial number of websites load JS to make prettier UI elements (like a nicer date picker) because the defaults are so ugly (on desktop at least -- mobile tends to be better). If browsers shippednicer default UI elements, folks would be be less inclined to write their own using JS.

And then there's larger fundamental changes to the API themselves. If HTML6 included virtual DOMs or reactive primitives, that might reduce the inclination towards framework bloat.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#38

Post by waboremo »

noahtallen wrote: post #36
enos_feedler wrote: post #14

I’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 coul…

I think there are a lot of huge misconceptions about modern web dev in posts like these. The part of the internet that’s trash is pretty much anything related to ad tech (and therefore tracking). But this is also what funds basically the entire web. Probably the best thing about the web is how accessible it is — you can use it for free if you can find an internet connection. Plus, its inherit flexibility makes it a v…

That's a great summary: economics of the internet.

Until we start discussing that, we're just going round and round with micro-optimizations while the elephant in the room continues swinging around.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#39

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

account-5 wrote: post #8

I've ublock installed with the advanced user setting ticked, JavaScript disabled by default. The amount of blogs that load nothing until JavaScript is enabled is ridiculous. And some sites simply don't run unless you enable 60 odd 3rd party JS scripts to run. Either way my experience of the web is fast and generally fine and any site that wants me to jump through hoops in ublock to run I don't bother with and I'm hap…

I think the next step is a plugin which runs the scummy JS, captures the DOM, and makes it available in some kind of P2P fashion so that others can just load it without running the JS. I'd put $5/month in an account to pay people to cache the web for me, $10 if they'd clean up the ads while they were at it.

Re: The Web I Want (2018)

#40

Post by ktosobcy »

paxys wrote: post #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 t…

I don't agree.

Apart from a couple of really big websites the vast majority of the remaining ones could easily be a static website. course we ended up in dumbed down version of reality where people can't do without Facebook / Instagram so instead of having public information you have to go to a Facebook fan page or Instagram profile...

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