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The taxonomy is useful but it’s not exhaustive, and it’s also reductive. Google Maps flits around to all four corners of this map depending on how you’re using

The taxonomy is useful but it’s not exhaustive, and it’s also reductive. Google Maps flits around to all four corners of this map depending on how you’re using it, and it needs intensive JavaScript support no matter where it ends up. Wikipedia is, it claims, a definitively ‘informational’ site, ignoring that it also supports an enormous massively multiplayer community of active editors and authors constantly changing it. What’s YouTube in this breakdown? What’s StackOverflow?

jameshart 3y ago
Actually on deeper reading I think the author bundles a lot of this into what they call ‘transactional’ in the top left. As they put it: > Any service that involves literal financial transactions — like Amazon, or your bank’s website — probably lives here But hang on - I need to be able to grab links to Amazon pages and send them to my friends. I don’t need to do the same with my bank statements. What do these sites have in common that this taxonomy usefully identifies? Forms with input fields?
- csande17 3y ago
  > What do these sites have in common that this taxonomy usefully identifies? Forms with input fields? Yes, that's what the article says, almost verbatim. The idea of the category is to identify sites that need to interact with a server to be useful, but do not need rich dynamic client-side interaction. The editing part of Wikipedia would be "transactional" under this definition, because (last I looked) the way you edit Wikipedia is by typing your changes into a textbox and clicking Submit. It's not a Google Docs kind of situation where all the editors can see each other's cursors move around and type stuff in real time.
joshmarinacci 3y ago
Theoretically YouTube would be informational. It's giant lists of videos. Once you find the page for the video it's media embedded in the page and wouldn't actually need JS to function once the video is downloaded. Just like Wikipedia.
- bertjk 3y ago
  It depends on what you think YouTube's product is. Are they a service that streams videos and recommendations to consumers, or a service that streams eyeballs and tracking data to advertisers? The first one might get by with HTML5, but the second one definitely requires some JS.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Unless you want to minimize the video while you browse other videos. Or upvote, downvote, and comment. Or monetize the videos with ads. Or a dozen other things.
  - zdragnar 3y ago
    Having to reload the page to like a video, add a comment or subscribe would definitely gut their engagement with creators.
- jameshart 3y ago
  Sure. Now describe it from the perspective of a YouTuber.
csande17 3y ago
I think you've identified that some websites are secretly multiple websites in a trenchcoat. The New York Times has a website at NYTimes.com where people read news stories, and a separate content management system where their employees write and publish stories. NYTimes.com is in the "informational" quadrant; the content management system is somewhere in the "online" half. The needs of these two systems are pretty dramatically different. Other websites blur the lines a bit more in their architecture. For example, WordPress blogs generally include an "admin" app that's almost completely separate from the main website, but hosted on the same domain. Other websites like Wikipedia and StackOverflow are nominally "the same website" but activate a lot of extra UI elements when you're logged in. But IMO it still makes sense to think of these as separate systems and optimize them individually. For example, Wikipedia uses a different serving path with much more aggressive caching when you're logged out (and the site is "informational"), vs when you're logged in as an editor (and the site is "transactional"). The "islands" architecture discussed in the article lets us extend this to individual features on the same page, too. Think of a startup marketing site's "chat with support" popup; that's pretty clearly a real-time island on an otherwise static page.

jameshart 3y ago

Actually on deeper reading I think the author bundles a lot of this into what they call ‘transactional’ in the top left. As they put it: > Any service that involves literal financial transactions — like Amazon, or your bank’s website — probably lives here But hang on - I need to be able to grab links to Amazon pages and send them to my friends. I don’t need to do the same with my bank statements. What do these sites have in common that this taxonomy usefully identifies? Forms with input fields?

csande17 3y ago
> What do these sites have in common that this taxonomy usefully identifies? Forms with input fields? Yes, that's what the article says, almost verbatim. The idea of the category is to identify sites that need to interact with a server to be useful, but do not need rich dynamic client-side interaction. The editing part of Wikipedia would be "transactional" under this definition, because (last I looked) the way you edit Wikipedia is by typing your changes into a textbox and clicking Submit. It's not a Google Docs kind of situation where all the editors can see each other's cursors move around and type stuff in real time.

joshmarinacci 3y ago

Theoretically YouTube would be informational. It's giant lists of videos. Once you find the page for the video it's media embedded in the page and wouldn't actually need JS to function once the video is downloaded. Just like Wikipedia.

bertjk 3y ago
It depends on what you think YouTube's product is. Are they a service that streams videos and recommendations to consumers, or a service that streams eyeballs and tracking data to advertisers? The first one might get by with HTML5, but the second one definitely requires some JS.
paulddraper 3y ago
Unless you want to minimize the video while you browse other videos. Or upvote, downvote, and comment. Or monetize the videos with ads. Or a dozen other things.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Having to reload the page to like a video, add a comment or subscribe would definitely gut their engagement with creators.
jameshart 3y ago
Sure. Now describe it from the perspective of a YouTuber.

csande17 3y ago

I think you've identified that some websites are secretly multiple websites in a trenchcoat. The New York Times has a website at NYTimes.com where people read news stories, and a separate content management system where their employees write and publish stories. NYTimes.com is in the "informational" quadrant; the content management system is somewhere in the "online" half. The needs of these two systems are pretty dramatically different. Other websites blur the lines a bit more in their architecture. For example, WordPress blogs generally include an "admin" app that's almost completely separate from the main website, but hosted on the same domain. Other websites like Wikipedia and StackOverflow are nominally "the same website" but activate a lot of extra UI elements when you're logged in. But IMO it still makes sense to think of these as separate systems and optimize them individually. For example, Wikipedia uses a different serving path with much more aggressive caching when you're logged out (and the site is "informational"), vs when you're logged in as an editor (and the site is "transactional"). The "islands" architecture discussed in the article lets us extend this to individual features on the same page, too. Think of a startup marketing site's "chat with support" popup; that's pretty clearly a real-time island on an otherwise static page.