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The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

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Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#371
post #75

Quite happy with my own web page/blog. Pages hover at around 10kb, 30kb if I include some images. I think the page size can be attributed a lot to there being no JS except for GA. I have taken a lot of inspiration from http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ Of course the size will differ depending on the site's purpose, but I feel like most web pages could stand to loose a lot of…

I have begun a 1 ko framework based on this website, if anyone is interested, I just pushed the code right now https://github.com/BafS/mu

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#372
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downvotes are because he is not engaging with my point. Never did I say the web is a proper application development environment. My point was that you can't create a proper application development environment that is both an open and defacto standard the way the web is.

How am I not engaging with your point? In response to a comment pointing out how we need to re-think web application development, you said: "The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." ...and then talked a bit about how it's open (yeah, ok, sure), and then you said it's not really a good application development environment (obviously). I'm saying, your entire premise is wrong: it isn't an appl…

I'm in the middle of reading through The Unix-Haters Handbook and I must say that the arguments against web-as-application-platform (and the attempts to defend it) and are eerily similar to what this book reports about arguments against Unix that were circulated in the 80s and early 90s. Sadly, the fact Unix managed to a) win, and b) fuck up the computing world so badly that people don't even realize how much we've lost doesn't make me hopeful about the future of the web.

Bad stuff seems to win because it's more evolutionarily adapted than well thought out stuff. This happens to hold for programming languages too.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That loaded SOOO fast on mobile with no delays or scrolling problems. Great job! Note: Might try it with NoScript later. Always a good indicator of... something...

Fun story about NoScript. I used to use AMP[0]. But I reverted that for two reasons. 1. The size of their js is ~170kb roughly 17 times larger than most of my pages. 2. It loads from a 3d party domain which means that NoScript/uBlock Origin users will see a blank white page. The project does impose some constraints that will help reduce page weight and increase page speed, but for my page sizes it's ridiculous to use…

>1. The size of their js is ~170kb roughly 17 times larger than most of my pages.

Presumably this would be heavily cached or baked into the browser, though -- assuming AMP takes off.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#374
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that a possible solution is also to better rank websites that mention the checksums of their external resources and make web browsers keep them in cache much longer... if pretty much every website uses jQuery, perhaps we should ship jQuery with the web browser?

I hear this argument a lot, and I very much disagree. Now you have browser vendors having to device which libraries are "popular" and shipping them in the initial download of the browser. It turns out that this technology already exists in a much better form. It's called cache. The problem is that almost everyone hosts their own version of jQuery. If everyone simply linked the "canonical" version of jQuery (the CDN l…

If everyone linked the "canonical" version of jquery, then that location would be worth a considerable amount of money to any sort of malicious actor. Just getting your version there for a few minutes could rope in many thousands of machines. Look at China's attack on github earlier in the year for examples of the damage that that sort of decision could do.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#375
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." No it isn't. Not even close. It's maybe the first cross-platform development "environment" of which millenials are widely aware. But it's only an "environment" in the most ecological sense -- it's a collection of ugly hacks, each building upon the other, with the sort of complexity and incomprehensibility and interdependency of organisms you'd expec…

> But it's only an "environment" in the most ecological sense -- it's a collection of ugly hacks, each building upon the other, with the sort of complexity and incomprehensibility and interdependency of organisms you'd expect to find in a dung heap. That's what every practical environment is. Only the environments which never get used remain "pristine" in the architectural sense, because you cannot fundamentally re-a…

Given how fast JS world jumps between frameworks I'm thinking that yes, a strong enough actor could in fact re-architect the Web, or at least clear out some of that dung heap...

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#376
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downvotes are because he is not engaging with my point. Never did I say the web is a proper application development environment. My point was that you can't create a proper application development environment that is both an open and defacto standard the way the web is.

> My point was that you can't create a proper application > development environment that is both an open and defacto > standard the way the web is. Why? Is there a technical limitation? Or are you saying that it's technically possible, but that you have no faith that vendors will cooperate and support such a thing?

The latter.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than "webpages." I think that is orthogonal to bloat. Sure, a complex app will always have more to load and compute than a static page with one blog post on it, but that doesn't mean an app can't be bloated on top of that, just like pages with just a single blog post on them can be bloated.

Speaking of bloat, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11548816 - The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

That's not really bloat, because anybody who sees your comment will already have that link in the browser cache ^_^

(To make this comment not entirely frivolous, does anyone remember the "bloatware hall of shame", or however it was called? I couldn't find it or anything decent like it, sadly. How about something like it for websites?)

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#378
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Android/iOS/OSX/Windows should just work on a better standard mechanism to deliver native apps instead one might imagine that after these competing and incompatible native apps become a headache for crossplatform pursuits, a new platform will emerge that provides a uniform toolset for developing (mostly) native-platform independent applications. perhaps this toolset will utilize a declarative system for specifying…

Magic! We could even have standardized links between the apps, and companies that specialize in finding content no matter what app it's in. I think you're on to something...it could be huge... Heh.

> I think you're on to something...it could be huge... Heh.

Could be. Sad that it isn't. Think how awesome it would be if app developers actually cared about interoperability instead of trying to grab the whole pie for themselves while giving you a hefty dose of ads in return. This is mostly the fault of developers, but the platform itself could help a lot if it was more end-user programmable. You'd have at least a chance to force different apps to talk to each other.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#379
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No it isn't. Not even close. It's maybe the first cross-platform development "environment" of which millenials are widely aware. Name one then instead of this patronizing BS.

Just off the top of my head: Delphi, Smalltalk, Java, Flash, Mono, and many different cross-library thunks like wxWindows, Qt, GTK+, and so on. Two seconds of googling will find you dozens.

Those aren't cross-platform the way the web is cross-platform, they all depend primarily on one vendor's implementation. None of those ever had any hope of crossing the chasm to ubiquity, they only gained as much traction as their vendor had market clout on a limited set of platforms for a limited time period.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#380
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a more radical departure is needed. It's about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than "webpages." Web browsers have more or less become mini operating systems, running elaborate virtual machines. There's way too much complexity for everyone involved — from web devs and browser devs to the users and the people who maintain the standards, th…

Not sure about the conclusion but you're absolutely right about the problem. This is why the social networks are eating such a great percentage of screen time: pure content, outside of web applications, is better suited in a single format rather than the superfluous loud magazines that currently pepper the web. Perhaps rather than native apps what we need is the return of gopher. I think that's what Apple's trying to…

That's a good point. Too much control over the form is left with website owners and too little with web users. Most of the web looks much better when you strip out the styling it comes with.

In a way, this is why I like doing more and more things from inside Emacs. I get a consistent interface that I control, and that is much more powerful than what each app or website I'd otherwise use can offer. Hell, it's a better interface than any popular OS has.

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