5 ms·
Way better than loading megabytes of .js just to display stupid animations and other useless gimmicky stuff. This file is just in consonance with this website'
by fb03 8y ago
Way better than loading megabytes of .js just to display stupid animations and other useless gimmicky stuff.
This file is just in consonance with this website's style: concise, terse, to-the-point and with minimal bs.
Of all of my currently in-rotation news websites, this loads and reacts the fastest, no matter where I am or how crippled my current connection is. I am sure they are factoring load times and speed over 'shiny new features'.
Keep going, YC!
- davnicwil 8y agoAnimations being badly/over used aside, this is a bit of a straw man argument. If you load megabytes of JS to do animations, as opposed to using CSS, then yes you are just doing it wrong. Things aren't either exactly right and done one way, or else terrible. You can of course have bells and whistles like animations if your usecase requires them (HN doesn't!) and still have a fast loading site with clean code, if you do it right.
- fb03 8y agoI agree with you. And the animations example was simply one of the bad offenders (merely one of the symptoms of the disease). The disease is overutilizing buckloads of js scaffolding which is blatant in the majority of the websites right now. Even a small blog now "has to have" the latest xzibit framework which pulls 32 foobar dependencies, all gulped into one huge blob of minified compressed clusterfuck-pack.
- davnicwil 8y agoYeah, I guess it is a tradeoff between engineering productivity and performance. Both are features. Past a certain level of complexity it is usually the correct decision to choose the framework and toolchain so that you can deliver and maintain features at all. "Make it work -> make it good -> make it fast" is very relevant here. Though I agree about what you're saying for blogs and other content sites, where the tradeoff is clearly inappropriate in a lot of cases. With that said, things like https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ offer an interesting '3rd way' here, allowing you to keep the productive toolchain and framework stuff but still serve a blazing fast static content site.
- ttn 8y agoI was at the bottom of Africa last month with unstable internet connection barely faster than dial-up. HN was the only site I could connect before getting timeouts and bs.
- praneshp 8y agoI get one of your points, that some sites should work in the bottom of Africa. But there is a counter-point here, no? Why should a site be developed for the worst of connections out there? Is there a middle point here?