7 ms·

More and more websites now reimplement loading the page in JavaScript. Just thinking about it makes me angry.

gnuvince 12y ago
I really dislike how a lot of multi-page navigation (i.e. getting results 51-100) is now commonly done with AJAX. It's not really faster than loading a new page, but it breaks the back button. "Oh you clicked on the 287th link and hit back? Here are results 1-50." So annoying.
- clarry 12y ago
  What's interesting is that in the past, all the Real web devs knew that frames suck because they break navigation. Anyone who showed their framed site in a community of cool web devs would be laughed at. Now it's cool to break the back button (and links and everything) and make me watch spinners. It's as if the text and thumbnails they're serving today somehow take two orders of magnitude more bandwidth to load...
  - mattdw 12y ago
    Devs and designers are now (more so than ever) different sets of people, and designers are now calling the shots in most places. I'm a web dev, I know that ajax loading sucks, that without enough budget to do it right (and we never have enough budget) UX ends up broken, messing with scrolling sucks, page-based is best, don't make an app if it should actually be a site, etc. Do I get any say? Not really. What do I end up building? Magic-scrolling ajax-loading apps, and if I have any budget left at the end of the job it goes on tweaking typography (i.e. designer-visible stuff) rather than fixing back buttons. Which is to say, devs still know that this stuff sucks, but we're no longer in charge of the relevant decisions.
    - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
      Please don't make this about developers versus designers. Good web designers will not make those kinds of mistakes. Bad developers might.
- tuxracer 12y ago
  The pushState API has been available for years. This isn't an inherent limitation of single page apps. Even where the pushState API isn't available (older versions of IE) the anchor tag can be be used to maintain browser history so the back button doesn't break. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/Manipulating_the_browser_history https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/M...
  - gnuvince 12y ago
    But here's the deal: now the web developer has to manually do something that used to be intrinsic to the way the web worked. Really feels like a step backwards to me.
- endgame 12y ago
  DISCOURSE I AM LOOKING AT YOU. In a real forum I'd open pages 1-n in tabs and read them on PT. On discourse I have to open the same page N times and scroll to a spread of points down the page.
timothya 12y ago
Why does that make you angry? Sometimes, reimplementing how loading works can make your website more performant, for example. If JavaScript gives developers the power to make their websites better, why shouldn't they take advantage of that power?
- clarry 12y ago
  If they haven't benchmarked their site on my computer, they don't know whether it's making their websites more performant. But years of experience with JS disabled by default (and only enabled when necessary) makes it very clear to me that using JS, at least on my system, is almost never a way to make any site more performant. On the contrary, it increases load times, cpu usage, and memory usage. It might also force me to use bloated crappy browsers like Firefox or Chrome where I could otherwise use something like w3m or links, which will display the page in a fraction of the RAM, much faster. I wouldn't be disabling JS if it weren't such a pain in the ass. Or maybe I still would, just for security.
  - timothya 12y ago
    Plenty of sites do use client-side instrumentation, and so they do indeed benchmark their site on your machine, and then make decisions based on the results of those benchmarks (likely aggregated with many other benchmarks from many other users). Yes, sometimes JavaScript is used poorly in ways that make sites bloated and slow, but plenty of sites use it properly in ways that only make their sites better (collecting the appropriate data to confirm that what they are doing is making their site better).
    - clarry 12y ago
      People talk about these sites every once in a while. But my experience is that enabling JS makes things worse across the board. If there's some site that would perform better with it, these are very much in the minority. And in my experience, "old web" sites with out JS loaders and such are almost always much faster & easier on the resources. Even if some sites deploy instrumentation, it doesn't mean they're necessarily lifting a finger to make it faster for me.

I really dislike how a lot of multi-page navigation (i.e. getting results 51-100) is now commonly done with AJAX. It's not really faster than loading a new page, but it breaks the back button. "Oh you clicked on the 287th link and hit back? Here are results 1-50." So annoying.

clarry 12y ago
What's interesting is that in the past, all the Real web devs knew that frames suck because they break navigation. Anyone who showed their framed site in a community of cool web devs would be laughed at. Now it's cool to break the back button (and links and everything) and make me watch spinners. It's as if the text and thumbnails they're serving today somehow take two orders of magnitude more bandwidth to load...
- mattdw 12y ago
  Devs and designers are now (more so than ever) different sets of people, and designers are now calling the shots in most places. I'm a web dev, I know that ajax loading sucks, that without enough budget to do it right (and we never have enough budget) UX ends up broken, messing with scrolling sucks, page-based is best, don't make an app if it should actually be a site, etc. Do I get any say? Not really. What do I end up building? Magic-scrolling ajax-loading apps, and if I have any budget left at the end of the job it goes on tweaking typography (i.e. designer-visible stuff) rather than fixing back buttons. Which is to say, devs still know that this stuff sucks, but we're no longer in charge of the relevant decisions.
  - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    Please don't make this about developers versus designers. Good web designers will not make those kinds of mistakes. Bad developers might.
tuxracer 12y ago
The pushState API has been available for years. This isn't an inherent limitation of single page apps. Even where the pushState API isn't available (older versions of IE) the anchor tag can be be used to maintain browser history so the back button doesn't break. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/Manipulating_the_browser_history https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/M...
- gnuvince 12y ago
  But here's the deal: now the web developer has to manually do something that used to be intrinsic to the way the web worked. Really feels like a step backwards to me.
endgame 12y ago
DISCOURSE I AM LOOKING AT YOU. In a real forum I'd open pages 1-n in tabs and read them on PT. On discourse I have to open the same page N times and scroll to a spread of points down the page.

timothya 12y ago

Why does that make you angry? Sometimes, reimplementing how loading works can make your website more performant, for example. If JavaScript gives developers the power to make their websites better, why shouldn't they take advantage of that power?

clarry 12y ago
If they haven't benchmarked their site on my computer, they don't know whether it's making their websites more performant. But years of experience with JS disabled by default (and only enabled when necessary) makes it very clear to me that using JS, at least on my system, is almost never a way to make any site more performant. On the contrary, it increases load times, cpu usage, and memory usage. It might also force me to use bloated crappy browsers like Firefox or Chrome where I could otherwise use something like w3m or links, which will display the page in a fraction of the RAM, much faster. I wouldn't be disabling JS if it weren't such a pain in the ass. Or maybe I still would, just for security.
- timothya 12y ago
  Plenty of sites do use client-side instrumentation, and so they do indeed benchmark their site on your machine, and then make decisions based on the results of those benchmarks (likely aggregated with many other benchmarks from many other users). Yes, sometimes JavaScript is used poorly in ways that make sites bloated and slow, but plenty of sites use it properly in ways that only make their sites better (collecting the appropriate data to confirm that what they are doing is making their site better).
  - clarry 12y ago
    People talk about these sites every once in a while. But my experience is that enabling JS makes things worse across the board. If there's some site that would perform better with it, these are very much in the minority. And in my experience, "old web" sites with out JS loaders and such are almost always much faster & easier on the resources. Even if some sites deploy instrumentation, it doesn't mean they're necessarily lifting a finger to make it faster for me.