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Big Fat Websites (2021)

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#61

Post by mro_name »

fleddr wrote: 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…

> It's not just incompetence leading to technical bloat.

it's bad decisions after all. How would you call that? Alien invasion?

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#62

Post by klibertp »

Jamie9912 wrote: post #35
john-doe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have 5 seconds to spare? 10 seconds to spare?

The question is more how often rather than how long. For example, this page: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/elisp.ht... takes nearly 15 seconds to fully load for me, but then I can live for literally weeks without having to refresh it (ie. other than on sporadic Firefox restart). That's quite obviously different in the 1/10-of-chapter-per-page style of docs that Rust books seem to like.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#63

Post by pvorb »

cehrlich wrote: post #26
detay wrote: 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.

That number is billions of people, which means that it's not going to happen.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#64

Post by [deleted] »

grishka wrote: post #46
fleddr wrote: 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…

A CMS, fundamentally, is a server application that pulls things out of the database, puts them into templates, and spits the resulting HTML out to the browser. There is no inherent reason why a page that comes out of a feature-rich CMS has to be bloated.

[deleted]

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#65

Post by josephg »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #52
josephg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not hate the player? I loaded an article the other day, and before I could read a single word the page had two popovers - one asking about cookies and the other asking if I wanted to join their mailing list, “So you can read more great content like this!”. Terrible websites make me angry and then get closed. What a horrible waste of our collective human potential.

Then create a blog without using any of this tech and you'll soon realise it goes nowhere.

I have a blog without any of that junk and it works out great. I get ~50k unique visitors on most of my posts, which I’m very happy with.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#66

Post by coldtea »

capableweb wrote: post #33
rimliu wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not necessarily the weight, but lots of other attributes of cars and other factory-made products are the way they are just because of the process in the factory. Sometimes to make production itself cheaper (not just material cost, but process-wise), sometimes to make it more efficient and sometimes just because automating it fully with good results is impossible, compared to making it by hand.

>Not necessarily the weight, but lots of other attributes of cars and other factory-made products are the way they are just because of the process in the factory.

Well, the magic of the digital realm is that the process doesn't dictate much, if anything at all, regarding the end result of a CMS.

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#67

Post by coldtea »

TAKEMYMONEY wrote: post #49

Minimalism is "subtract until it breaks" and this is reaching the breaking point. Of course, we all hate popovers, slow websites etc, we've known this for decades. This website has no identity other than an emoji and the fact that it's purposefully lacking design beyond basic text styling. It looks like 1000 other sites, at a glance I can't tell what this website or article are about. And there are still elements I w…

>It looks like 1000 other sites, at a glance I can't tell what this website or article are about.

Yes, you have to actual read it. Oh, the humanity!

Re: Big Fat Websites (2021)

#70

Post by mch0lic1 »

It's a daily fight for me. The underlying issue is that everyone is chasing profits and larger sites have multiple teams working on them (dev, seo, marketing, sales, etc). So while devs might be trying to optimize as much as they can, other teams can come and put 3 google analytics-like trackers, affiliate trackers, heatmap analytics, live chats, 3rd party popup services that collects emails, etc. And don't get me started on oversized images with 0 compression... And the worst part, those poorly written affiliate trackers, popups and live chats actually bringing revenue so there is always a push for more.
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