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@iceb That's how you get a perfect 100/100 score on Google Pagespeed. BTDT.
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The 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 :/ -
@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. -
@saucyatom lol. i love the salt there and all valid criticism
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@ars1 oh I often find these when i'm looking for tips for old games.
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@ars1 we could bring 90s style shit sites back for nostalgia. We need to blinking gifs to cause seizures too.
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@Demolishun also the surveillance like me on facebook buttons
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> 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. -
@IHateForALiving said every gatekeeping idiots and nostalgitards.
![](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="150" height="150"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
Found something true as 1 == 1
Life when you didn't know about browsers developer tools
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