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I'm going to go against what appears to be popular opinion and suggest that this reeks of a "back in my day..." complaint. There's always been poorly-written s

I'm going to go against what appears to be popular opinion and suggest that this reeks of a "back in my day..." complaint. There's always been poorly-written software, poorly-created websites, bad UIs, bad UX, etc. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. Suggesting that the entire web is devolving into a vat of poor decisions is, I think, a bit alarmist. Technology changes, things progress, sometimes things get slightly worse before they get better. But I think, on the whole, things are moving in a good direction. And we'll always be able to pick out a few bad examples to justify why the sky is falling. But in the end, I much prefer the current state of affairs to the way things were a decade ago.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
I think the point here is that websites where you come for information should give you just that - information, and not to get in your way. Let me dissect the problem into parts: * Bloat - not only HTML, but also CSS, JS, a ton o plugins, social media buttons etc. This all slows things down and often obscures the content - that is the very reason you came to visit the site. * Poor UI decisions - with plain ol' HTML a link is a link, an image is an image - when you try to change an HTML document into an app you have to mix different roles. * User-hostile decisions - popups and similar, lack of permanent links, etc. In vanilla HTML you didn't have these. This has nothing to do with "back in the old days". The web in the 90s was very often horrible, and Flash made it worse (although it's a pity Google and Apple killed it - Adobe could well have opened it when they had a chance and we could all enjoy an independent open platform - but that's a topic for another discussion.)
weego 9y ago
does pragmatism really fade away in the face of progress?
birksherty 9y ago
"I much prefer the current state of affairs to the way things were a decade ago" It's what the developers say. Every developer has latest macbook, works on a shiny new office with AC with all the bandwidth and gadgets. And they think people all around the world also has the same thing. Whereas lots of users don't care about the AJAX loading. Users want websites to be fast and less annoying. But, developers only care about latest hot frameworks even though that will make things slow for users. Newest Youtube redesign is the same. It consumes more cpu and way much slower than the previous one. I know because I don't have a high end laptop and 100mbps internet. It does not matter because Google employees use all the latest gadgets.
- Qub3d 9y ago
  I found a presentation a while back that covers "website obesity"[0]. It puts some quantifiers on the problem you're describing. [0]: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
- vim_wannabe 9y ago
  I think the Youtube redesign idea is to use something like polymers or whatever they are called. They are a Google technology supported in Chrome, but since other browsers need to use some clunky and superslow javascript polyfill Chrome suddenly feels like the fast browser.
  - dabockster 9y ago
    Wow, this is evil.
    - applecrazy 9y ago
      Not really. Other browser vendors can implement the standard too, which is called Web Components. fyi: It's generally considered bad practice to assume bad intentions when alternative explanations suffice.
      - jklein11 9y ago
        I don't think that assumption was unfair. The way that the previous comment was framed, Google implemented this so that other browsers seemed slow. Those intentions seem pretty evil. With the framing of pushing browsers to implementing the Web Components standard it seems much less evil. I think the true motivations are likely somewhere in the middle.
      - vim_wannabe 9y ago
        It's still a draft i think.
  - ehllo 9y ago
    you're right, they used Polymer and Material Design for the frontend in combination with the spfjs framework, which was introduced in 2014. https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/05/a-sneak-peek-at-youtubes-new-look-and.html https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/05/a-sneak-peek-at-youtu... https://github.com/youtube/spfjs https://github.com/youtube/spfjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNe_HdayTtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNe_HdayTtY
hood_syntax 9y ago
> There's always been poorly-written software, poorly-created websites, bad UIs, bad UX, etc... Yes, but the bad websites in the old days didn't lug in a bunch of unnecessary js to accomplish their aim. I do think things are improving as a whole, like you do, but we're currently on the latter half of a pendulum swing from barebones to over-engineered.
- Too 9y ago
  Don't forget we used to have flash back then. It wasn't pretty.
  - twobyfour 9y ago
    Yeah, but basic news or discussion sites didn't use Flash. In fact, the vast majority of sites didn't; or only used it for games or video - i.e. use cases that called for it. And "Flash sucked" is no excuse for the web being bloated and delivering text content in ridiculously stupid ways today.
rainbowmverse 9y ago
The problem is the bad stuff seems to be the norm. I wanted to use Patreon's embed code on my site. The embed loaded megabytes of JavaScript to show a button. All the button does is take you to my Patreon. I took a screenshot, cropped it, saved it as PNG, and embedded it with a plain old image tag. 3KB vs. 3000KB, and maybe I lost some fancy auto-scaling magic the culled JavaScript did. Big deal. This is a company that positions itself as the new way for creative people to make a living in the 21st century, and they need multiple megabytes and several seconds to load the 175x36 road into that future. We're not quite in the future yet, and 3MB is still a lot to ask of limited data plans.
- dabockster 9y ago
  > The embed loaded megabytes of JavaScript to show a button. They're probably hooking into their analytics platform.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

I think the point here is that websites where you come for information should give you just that - information, and not to get in your way. Let me dissect the problem into parts: * Bloat - not only HTML, but also CSS, JS, a ton o plugins, social media buttons etc. This all slows things down and often obscures the content - that is the very reason you came to visit the site. * Poor UI decisions - with plain ol' HTML a link is a link, an image is an image - when you try to change an HTML document into an app you have to mix different roles. * User-hostile decisions - popups and similar, lack of permanent links, etc. In vanilla HTML you didn't have these. This has nothing to do with "back in the old days". The web in the 90s was very often horrible, and Flash made it worse (although it's a pity Google and Apple killed it - Adobe could well have opened it when they had a chance and we could all enjoy an independent open platform - but that's a topic for another discussion.)

weego 9y ago

does pragmatism really fade away in the face of progress?

birksherty 9y ago

"I much prefer the current state of affairs to the way things were a decade ago" It's what the developers say. Every developer has latest macbook, works on a shiny new office with AC with all the bandwidth and gadgets. And they think people all around the world also has the same thing. Whereas lots of users don't care about the AJAX loading. Users want websites to be fast and less annoying. But, developers only care about latest hot frameworks even though that will make things slow for users. Newest Youtube redesign is the same. It consumes more cpu and way much slower than the previous one. I know because I don't have a high end laptop and 100mbps internet. It does not matter because Google employees use all the latest gadgets.

Qub3d 9y ago
I found a presentation a while back that covers "website obesity"[0]. It puts some quantifiers on the problem you're describing. [0]: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
vim_wannabe 9y ago
I think the Youtube redesign idea is to use something like polymers or whatever they are called. They are a Google technology supported in Chrome, but since other browsers need to use some clunky and superslow javascript polyfill Chrome suddenly feels like the fast browser.
- dabockster 9y ago
  Wow, this is evil.
  - applecrazy 9y ago
    Not really. Other browser vendors can implement the standard too, which is called Web Components. fyi: It's generally considered bad practice to assume bad intentions when alternative explanations suffice.
    - jklein11 9y ago
      I don't think that assumption was unfair. The way that the previous comment was framed, Google implemented this so that other browsers seemed slow. Those intentions seem pretty evil. With the framing of pushing browsers to implementing the Web Components standard it seems much less evil. I think the true motivations are likely somewhere in the middle.
    - vim_wannabe 9y ago
      It's still a draft i think.
- ehllo 9y ago
  you're right, they used Polymer and Material Design for the frontend in combination with the spfjs framework, which was introduced in 2014. https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/05/a-sneak-peek-at-youtubes-new-look-and.html https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/05/a-sneak-peek-at-youtu... https://github.com/youtube/spfjs https://github.com/youtube/spfjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNe_HdayTtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNe_HdayTtY

hood_syntax 9y ago

> There's always been poorly-written software, poorly-created websites, bad UIs, bad UX, etc... Yes, but the bad websites in the old days didn't lug in a bunch of unnecessary js to accomplish their aim. I do think things are improving as a whole, like you do, but we're currently on the latter half of a pendulum swing from barebones to over-engineered.

Too 9y ago
Don't forget we used to have flash back then. It wasn't pretty.
- twobyfour 9y ago
  Yeah, but basic news or discussion sites didn't use Flash. In fact, the vast majority of sites didn't; or only used it for games or video - i.e. use cases that called for it. And "Flash sucked" is no excuse for the web being bloated and delivering text content in ridiculously stupid ways today.

rainbowmverse 9y ago

The problem is the bad stuff seems to be the norm. I wanted to use Patreon's embed code on my site. The embed loaded megabytes of JavaScript to show a button. All the button does is take you to my Patreon. I took a screenshot, cropped it, saved it as PNG, and embedded it with a plain old image tag. 3KB vs. 3000KB, and maybe I lost some fancy auto-scaling magic the culled JavaScript did. Big deal. This is a company that positions itself as the new way for creative people to make a living in the 21st century, and they need multiple megabytes and several seconds to load the 175x36 road into that future. We're not quite in the future yet, and 3MB is still a lot to ask of limited data plans.

dabockster 9y ago
> The embed loaded megabytes of JavaScript to show a button. They're probably hooking into their analytics platform.