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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#81

Post by erik_seaberg »

jlg23 wrote: post #29
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #16

I agree with the spirit of the article, in that we should be striving for a leaner web. But last year I had to build an iOS SDK. As an SDK, we wanted it to be as small as humanly possible. It came out to around 12mb, which is obviously too large. So I tried removing literally everything but one file, and it came out to 10mb. So an iOS package, compiled, with only one class, comes out to 10 megabytes. Yes, the web can…

I dare to disagree: 10MB for a single-class-app is "as dire as some make it out to be". For comparison: Doom 2 came on 4 1.44MB floppy disks, Duke Nukem 3D on 13. Full games, including all assets.... going into a quiet corner for some weeping

1 MB RAM was enough to run the Space Shuttle.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#82

Post by zanny »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…

I must say, despite what I imagine is a good bit of traffic the instant load times on your site were a joy to behold. I never get to experience that kind of speed on the "modern" web. Even HN loads orders of magnitude slower than that.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#83

Post by cheezymoogle »

pc86 wrote: post #77
Pete_D wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you'd prefer comparing the code of a website to the amount of useful content on the website, which OP also did. Taking "I'm downloading 100mb worth of stuff (83 Moby-Dicks) to read 72kb worth of plaintext" at face value, we could also say that 0.072% of the data transferred is useful, or, equivalently, that 99.928% of it is crap.

You don't have to download the typography of a physical book but it still plays a huge role in the readability and enjoyment of it. So I guess the typography of websites is "crap" because it has to be downloaded? It's a ridiculous apples-and-hammers comparison thinly veiled as an intelligent critique.

I can put raw text on a kindle and read it. In fact, I frequently do. Comparing digital text to digital text is not apples-and-hammers.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#84

Post by techbio »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #52
ukulele wrote: post #45

Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…

They're not idiots, they just don't give a crap about waste until it affects their bottom line. (Most humans seem to operate on this principle) A lot of the business-related bullshit is a response to advertising and sales. But a lot is also lazy tech people slapping pieces together until it does a thing, and they don't care that it loads 100x more data than it needs to, because again, doesn't affect their bottom line…

In a world where video over IP exists, market rate traffic expenses have got to be among the least of the concerns of print journalism.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#85

Post by paulie_a »

pmarreck wrote: post #9

I am increasingly encountering news sites that detect ad blocking software and (understandably) refuse to show me their content as a result but the problem is that I enabled ad-blocking on those sites to begin with because they were loading nasty javascript ads on the fly which pegged my CPU! As a web dev, I feel extremely conscious about what I'd call "javascript library hygiene", and I feel that whoever's in charge…

I've noticed that trend also. Those are websites I keep a mental note to not visit. They usually have bottom of the barrel ads anyways and shitty content.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#86

Post by eterm »

I've been thinking about building either a local proxy or firefox addon that puts everything into "first-party only" mode unless whitelisted.

It would probably break the web (at least the genuine parts) less than disabling javascript wholesale which is just too awkward, but it would vastly cut down on the "bullshit" as this article calls it.

It would need some care, for example it would probably have to work from root domains rather than subdomains for matching origin to prevent too much breakage but the improvement in download times would be astronomical, it's almost always the case that "bloat" is third-party bloat.

Obviously it would need to support a whitelist too so payment processors for example could continue to work, but in general the blacklist approach of ad-blockers just isn't working for me.

I think some kind of "auto-whitelist" so I'd need to actively request a domain before requests could be made to them would be the sweet spot for user experience but that itself would require substantial browser integration which I don't think could work through a plugin.

Perhaps a proxy approach would be the best from a UX perspective then. It could inspect headers to figure out if they're primary requests (using similar heuristics to CORS). Primary requests would (or could) be added to an auto-whitelist for future requests.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#87

Post by phyzome »

ukulele wrote: post #45

Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…

It's still bullshit, because it doesn't help the visitor, and it only helps the company to the extent that they're in a Red Queen's Race—if no one else did it, they wouldn't have to either.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#88

Post by dictum »

ukulele wrote: post #45

Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…

I know I'm an idealist too, and my comment will be a display of hypocrisy: it seems that one of the rules for using the Internet is that you should completely forget about the is-ought problem.

People will dole out all kinds of advice about technology, business, politics, society, relationships etc. by way of discussing something that only partially resembles reality (and assuming everyone or most people perceive things in the same way as themselves)

(I'm guilty of that too.)

Re: The Bullshit Web

#89

Post by cheezymoogle »

zanny wrote: post #82
cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb. I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long…

I must say, despite what I imagine is a good bit of traffic the instant load times on your site were a joy to behold. I never get to experience that kind of speed on the "modern" web. Even HN loads orders of magnitude slower than that.

Not my website, but please send along thanks and awareness to @thebarrytone on Twitter!

Re: The Bullshit Web

#90

Post by fyrabanks »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #67
_louisr_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is both an appeal to people's universal appreciation of efficiency, and a weak denunciation of the modern web. Your argument is 1) that a website's value is the number of words on the page, and 2) that raw text is the highest value data that can be transmitted over the internet, and 3) that inefficiency and wastefulness of bits is a bad thing First off, you need to defend your first two assumptions. Don't websit…

1. A website's value is the amount of information that it provides to the end user. I would argue that the entirety of the works of Shakespeare or the 1911 Brittanica Encyclopedia provides more information than a high-definition picture of Donald Trump grimacing at EU leaders or an autoplaying ad for Doritos Locos Tacos NEW AT TACO BELL. As far as supplemental uses, at the end of the day, people are using plaintext t…

In response to #2, there is also a reason that photojournalism exists--unless you believe in a world where everyone imagines what important figures and historic events look like based solely on textual descriptions. This is completely ignoring the fact that I, nor most of society, would never attempt to receive the day's news via Morse Code.
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