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I have given this discussion a good looking over to see if anyone cares for the environment. Glad to find someone that does. I believe that care for the enviro

I have given this discussion a good looking over to see if anyone cares for the environment. Glad to find someone that does. I believe that care for the environment and design that puts being green first is going to have its time in web design. I also believe that along with document structure, accessibility and 'don't make me think' UX that eco-friendliness is going to become a core design principle in a lot of the web. If you put this stuff first then you can have a website that is pretty close to the plaintext ideal. This can be layered on with progressive web app 'no network' functionality and other progressive enhancements, e.g. CSS then JS, with the content working without either of these add-ons. We all know that you have to minimise your scripts and mash them all into some big ball of goo, we all know that images that are too big aren't going to download quickly. But the focus is on 'site speed' rather than being green. In fact no developer I have ever met has mentioned 'being green' as a reason to cut down on the bloat and existing thinking on 'going green' consists of having wind turbines rather than dinosaur farts powering the data centre. Cutting down the megabytes to go green is kind of crazy talk. A lot of this thinking is a bit like compacting your rubbish before putting it put for the bin men. Really we would do best to not do the rigmarole of compacting the trash and just having less of it to start with, ideally with more of it re-used or put out for recycling. We saw what cheap gasoline did to the U.S. auto industry. For decades the big three added on more and more inches to bonnets (hoods) and boots (trunks) with very big V8 engines a standard feature. Until 1973 came along there was no incentive to do otherwise. Who would have thought to have cut down on the fuel consumption? Outside of America, in the land of the rising sun they did not have a lot of oil. Every gallon they bought had to be bought in U.S. Dollars and so those U.S. Dollars had to be earned first. Europe faced the same problem so economy was of importance in a lot of the world outside America. The four cylinder engines powering cars in Europe and Japan became vastly more efficient than U.S. V8 monster engines. Not only that but cars with a four cylinder engine did not have to weigh many metric tonnes. Nowadays the big three can only really make trucks and truck based SUVs that are protected with the Chicken Tax. Nobody in America is buying U.S. made small cars, U.S. made luxury sedans or even U.S. made 'exotic' sportscars. Economy and 'being green' is not a big deal to U.S. car buyers, nonetheless the lack of having efficiency and economy as a core part of the design ethos has led to a domestic industry that has lost to the innovators in the rest of the world that did put these things central to what they do. We haven't had 1973 yet and the web pages of today are those hideous Cadillac things with the big fins on them and boots big enough to smuggle extended families across the border with. AMP pages are a bit like those early 'Datsun' efforts that fell short in many ways. But I think that the time of efficient web pages is coming. The Japanese also developed The Toyota Way with things like Just in Time and a careful keeping tabs on waste. Quality circles also were part of this new world of manufacturing ethos. The old ways of making stuff didn't really give the results the Japanese were getting but exchange rates, Japanese people willing to work for nothing and other non-sequiturs distracted people from what was going on and how the miracles were achieved. The Germans and the Japanese built great engineering 'platforms' and then got some great styling for the bodywork from the legendary Italian design studios to package it all together. Meanwhile, in the USA there were more fins, more chrome bullets on the grille and more velour in the interiors. So with the web it isn't just the Lotus 'just add lightness' that is going to be coming along to kill the bloat. It is also ways of working. For a long time the industry has been doing design with lorem ipsum, static PDF mockups and then handing this to some developers with the client expecting not a pixel to differ from the mockups, regardless of whether any of it made any sense. So we have got stuck with the same carousels on the same homepages - the tailfins of the web. Although it is 'industry standard' to work certain ways, e.g. the big up front design by someone who can't really read, the project manager who can't do HTML, the agile design process that means nobody knows what they are doing, something has to change. Content driven, iterative improvements and much else we forgot from the 'Toyota Way' will ultimately win out with things like being green actually being important. As for the article, the 'bulls4it web' and David Graeber's ideas as applied to web bloat is an excellent contribution to what web developers should be thinking about.

cheezymoogle 8y ago
Awesome take on the situation.
userbinator 8y ago
I think the car analogy is flawed; yes, mid-century US cars were not very economical/efficient, but they sacrificed that for comfort --- big roomy interiors, cushy seats, soft suspensions, automatic transmissions, A/C, etc. The automakers were simply obliging to please customers with these features. There's a reason "econobox" is mostly a pejorative. On the other hand, bloated slow websites only serve the needs of their authors, while annoying all their users. Users aren't asking for more tracking, ads, or any of that other bullshit. (Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of vintage "Detroit Iron". You really have to ride in one to understand the experience.)
- Theodores 8y ago
  > On the other hand, bloated slow websites only serve the needs of their authors, while annoying all their users. Users aren't asking for more tracking, ads, or any of that other bullshit. The bloat actually serves a lot of people, directly or indirectly. It is like packaging, everyone complains about packaging and plastic but when you are in the supermarket do you take that box that is already opened or that tin with the dent? There are lots of stakeholders behind the bloat. Including the bullshit jobs people of the online world, e.g. the SEO people, the people in marketing and the programmers. In my opinion the cookie-cutter way of churning out websites is being done by a lot of people that are barking up the wrong tree on how to do it with knowledge of modern web technologies rarely gained. Buried in what you see is a bundle of reset scripts, IE6 polyfills and other stuff that nobody dares to touch as it has been there since 2009 and nobody knows what it does, within the company that wrote the CMS or in the agency that adds the 'theme'. It is worrying really with the best people can do is to add layers of ever more complex 'build' tools to mash this cruft into something they don't have to think about. P.S. There is no way I would be in an econobox if travelling through the American West, give me one of your trucks, SUVs or even a sedan any day. In Europe though, tables are turned, a country lane or a city stranded in a U.S. vehicle would be a special kind of hell.

cheezymoogle 8y ago

Awesome take on the situation.

userbinator 8y ago

I think the car analogy is flawed; yes, mid-century US cars were not very economical/efficient, but they sacrificed that for comfort --- big roomy interiors, cushy seats, soft suspensions, automatic transmissions, A/C, etc. The automakers were simply obliging to please customers with these features. There's a reason "econobox" is mostly a pejorative. On the other hand, bloated slow websites only serve the needs of their authors, while annoying all their users. Users aren't asking for more tracking, ads, or any of that other bullshit. (Full disclosure: I'm a big fan of vintage "Detroit Iron". You really have to ride in one to understand the experience.)

Theodores 8y ago
> On the other hand, bloated slow websites only serve the needs of their authors, while annoying all their users. Users aren't asking for more tracking, ads, or any of that other bullshit. The bloat actually serves a lot of people, directly or indirectly. It is like packaging, everyone complains about packaging and plastic but when you are in the supermarket do you take that box that is already opened or that tin with the dent? There are lots of stakeholders behind the bloat. Including the bullshit jobs people of the online world, e.g. the SEO people, the people in marketing and the programmers. In my opinion the cookie-cutter way of churning out websites is being done by a lot of people that are barking up the wrong tree on how to do it with knowledge of modern web technologies rarely gained. Buried in what you see is a bundle of reset scripts, IE6 polyfills and other stuff that nobody dares to touch as it has been there since 2009 and nobody knows what it does, within the company that wrote the CMS or in the agency that adds the 'theme'. It is worrying really with the best people can do is to add layers of ever more complex 'build' tools to mash this cruft into something they don't have to think about. P.S. There is no way I would be in an econobox if travelling through the American West, give me one of your trucks, SUVs or even a sedan any day. In Europe though, tables are turned, a country lane or a city stranded in a U.S. vehicle would be a special kind of hell.