• Jan 2015 update
• Feb 2015 Update
• Mar 2015
• Curl
• Apr 2015

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

Well-designed sites are typically responsively-designed, so they function fine on my smartphone, although I wish designers would trend toward a larger font size for the phone.

In recent years, the font size and line-height have increased for the desktop/laptop versions of websites. But in my opinion, some responsively-designed sites use a font size that is too small for the phone.

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.

Jan 2015 update

http://www.sitepoint.com/average-page-weight-increases-15-2014/

https://gigaom.com/2014/12/29/the-overweight-web-average-web-page-size-is-up-15-in-2014/

Bloated CNN design. It took so long to load on my iPhone 5 that I gave up.
https://news.layervault.com/stories/41293-cnns-redesign-finally-for-public

Feb 2015 Update

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8983158

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

https://medium.com/@codepo8/the-web-application-myth-69c6b1506515

Mar 2015

Pinterest website is a web abuser while simply viewing the site as a browsing-only user.
https://www.pinterest.com/evanka/knitting-loom-crochet-and-anything-yarn/

Twitter's website is a web abuser on the desktop/lapop and on the phone. Unacceptable back-button usage. Can't open page in the background on the phone. Can't copy text with JavaScript disabled. Infuriating.

Hilariously stupid that such huge properties fail at basic web design that existed more than 20 years ago. No matter. I don't need these properties. It's a "world wide" web.

This web page about tablet weaving is superior in design compared to what Twitter and Pinterest creates. That's because this tablet weaving page is more aligned with the true spirit of the web.

http://www.shelaghlewins.com/tablet_weaving/TW01/TW01.htm

Curl

http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2015/03/20/curl-17-years-old-today/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9236551

HN comments:

> "If it doesn't load through curl, it's broken." --someone

So, so true. Thanks, curl.

---

That's pretty much my own test for a Web based API - if I can drive it from the command line using curl then great, if I can't then it's broken.

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I wasn't saying not to do the fancy stuff but rather to start with something which degrades well and then have your JavaScript enhance that basic experience. If you want to know why this is a good idea, you should start using something like getsentry.com or errorception.com to record your JavaScript errors.

---

I've been using websites since the early 90s and this pro-single-page sentiment is getting really tiresome. You are breaking the web. You are destroying users' security. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to use JavaScript, and plenty of places where it's appropriate. It probably is a good idea for games and so forth. But requiring users to load and execute constantly-changing code from across the web in order to read a page or submit a form is in-friggin-sane.

Some one else pointed out that it'd be nice if browsers offered more support for things that certain types of developers clearly want to do. I completely agree; it'd definitely be nice to take advantage of many of the technologies which currently exist to do more, in a more structured way. But requiring code execution in order to read data is madness.

http://chase-seibert.github.io/blog/2014/05/30/rich-client-side-web-apps-gone-too-far.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9282744

Apr 2015

I tried to read a story at usatoday.com, using the Firefox browser with the NoScripts plug-in. Even with everything temporarily enabled for the page/site, the site functions horribly. It's an appalling UI/UX. Wow. People get paid to produce web-abusive sites. A 1995-designed site would also be superior to this usatoday.com train wreck. Amazing.

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