Ranter
Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Comments
-
iceb97914hI do too. But tech always recycles itself. I wonder if it's time to take advantage of it and start making websites the old fashioned way
-
Voxera1175413hThe main reasons for the bloat is customers wanting more features (not all but most) and companies wanting to get a return on investment.
Many of the early websites you talk about was run on a steady loss of money.
That worked while the web was young and people with money was willing to risk their money for the hopes of making more money.
But as that profit became more and more elusive you got more advertising and then ways to prevent adblock and the need to reach more groups of customers and legal demands to support disabilities (something most of the early web was horribly bad at)
And then when you started to make money came the copy cats and you had to add more superficial features to compete since the mass of the customers did not care for quality but “shiny”.
The sad truth is that the old style web was never sustainable and could only ever be a foot note in history :/ -
exerceo81313h@Voxera One would expect that lightweight websites cost less. Also, these heavy JavaScript websites don't get much more work done.
YouTube has less functionality than it had in 2012, yet it needs several megabytes of JavaScript. This means it is far less efficient. -
Lensflare1211413h@Demolishun @exerceo
There are browser plugins which bring it back.
It works because the api is still there and google just removed it from the ui. -
exerceo81311h@Lensflare Legacy YouTube used no API for the basic page layout. It immediately served the page text through HTML.
-
jestdotty70811hWhen you post stuff on YouTube it doesn't even show up. They pre-approve comments lol
Dead echo chamber -
ars1341710hThe thing I miss the most is the flaming skull gif websites for video game guides, tips, bgm downloads, and other fan work.
Maybe I should build one -
Aren’t things better now? As in performance, accessibility, maintainability, scalability?
-
@ars1 we could bring 90s style shit sites back for nostalgia. We need to blinking gifs to cause seizures too.
-
> yes sire I want to create this very tight coupling between frontend and backend; so much so, in fact, my backend returns the actual fucking frontend rather than the two of them being entirely separated projects as any sane person would treat two programs running in different environments, different languages and different machines with different requirements and different limitations. I want my API calls to return GUI elements rather than actual data and if I need to make a mobile application I need to make all of these endpoints from scratch again -this one time to return the actual data, because maybe this new application can't render HTML because it's not a fucking browser-, I want to be stuck with form url encoded stuff rather than having the freedom to send back and forth all the data I need, I want all of that bloat because the nostalgic feel is so good :)
Said by nobody ever. -
Yeah me too, i want to go back when the web was only an elite thing for university before the peasants got their hands on it.
Its because I feel superior to anybody else and nostalgia and reactionary thinking are my main drivers.
Related Rants
I miss the good times when the web was lightweight and efficient.
I miss the times when essential website content was immediately delivered as HTML through the first HTTP request.
I miss the times when I could open a twitter URL and have the tweet text appear on screen in two seconds rather than a useless splash screen followed by some loading spinners.
I miss the times when I could open a YouTube watch page and see the title and description on screen in two seconds rather than in ten.
I miss the times when YouTube comments were readily loaded rather than only starting to load when I scroll down.
JavaScript was lightweight and used for its intended purpose, to enhance the experience by loading content at the page bottom and by allowing interaction such as posting comments without having to reload the entire page, for example.
Now pretty much all popular websites are bloated with heavy JavaScript. Your browser needs to walk through millions of bytes of JavaScript code just to show a tweet worth 200 bytes of text.
The watch page of YouTube (known as "polymer", used since 2017) loads more than eight megabytes of JavaScript last time I checked. In 2012, it was one to two hundred kilobytes of HTML and at most a few hundred kilobytes of JavaScript, mostly for the HTML5 player.
And if one little error dares to occur on a JavaScript-based page, you get a blank page of nothingness.
Sure, computers are more powerful than they used to be. But that does not mean we should deliberately make our new software and website slower and more bloated.
"Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A presentation by Jake Archibald from 2015, but more valid than ever: https://youtube.com/watch/...
rant
progressive enhancement
web