Breaking the web in 2014

More site owners are offending the web with their effed-up, bloated javascript-heavy constructions.

These ill-conceived content sites do not provide users with a simple and enjoyable reading experience.

Site developers misuse modern browser technologies in order to show off their alleged technical prowess to their like-minded, dorky web offenders.

The other problem, especially for professional content media sites, are the number of trackers and other gobbledygook that gets downloaded to a user's browser, which severely slows down the page load time.

Many so-called new-and-improved web designs bog down older desktop/laptop computers. The JavaScript, the trackers, etc. devour the older CPUs. It's suppose to be a web page with content and not a video game.

We might be better off if we designed sites with minimal HTML and minimal responsive design, creating what might be called responsible design.

A few suggestions:

• Try designing the site without javascript, or test the site with javascript disabled, and ensure that the site still works with progressive enhancement.

• Limit the use of giant images.

• Make every image count. Don't use an image just because it looks cool when it has nothing to do with the rest of the content.

• Don't break the back button.

• Don't break the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste for desktop/laptop users.

• Don't create confusing and unfamiliar click/touch actions on links and navigation.

• If you can't control yourself, then create a frigging native app instead of blanking up the web.

This might make web development boring, but the focus, however, should be on the content and not nifty animations.

Maybe this is how content providers can charge a fee for their content by offering the plain, simple, usable version of their site for a price. The free users get deluged with the bloated, ad-heavy, so-called sophisticated, modern version.

I understand that geeks like to incorporate their new skills into new and existing projects, but the hip tech-of-the-day should still provide value to the end users.

Too much of this new stuff seems like a solution in need of a problem. Geeks cannot find enough problems to solve with the new tech, so they create new problems by unnecessarily gumming up the works on web sites that did not have problems.

The web experience is becoming increasingly frustrating. Sites that once worked fine by my standards are now becoming so annoying that I may stop reading them, or I'll read their content only if it's provided in an RSS feed that I can view within my site here.

On my older laptop, I use Firefox with the NoScript plug-in, so that by default, I view every website with JavaScript disabled. This speeds up page load time dramatically.

Through the NoScript plug-in, I can enable some or all scripts for the page or the entire site either temporarily or indefinitely. The control is more with me.

For sites that fail to work without JavaScript, I will either enable JS if I like the site, as with Medium.com, or I simply move on, since it's the World Wide Web.

On mobile, however, I primarily use the Safari browser on my iPhone with JS enabled. Well-designed sites are typically responsively-designed, so they function fine on my smartphone.

By mobile, I mean my phone, since I no longer use a tablet. I read for long periods on my iPhone.

When viewing some websites on my laptop, I resize my browser to get the "mobile" version of the responsively-designed site because it functions and looks better than the full-size version.

On my phone, I have little patience for web sites that are not responsively-designed. It's nearly 2015, and thankfully, I'm encountering non-responsive sites less often.

I have no idea why news.ycombinator.com refuses to make the slight changes to enable the site to display well on a smartphone. Among sites that I visit regularly, Hacker News is about the only non-responsively-designed site that I tolerate on the phone.

#web - #javascript - #css - #html5 - #responsive - #design - #moronism - #blog_jr