[HN Gopher] Big Fat Websites (2021)
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Big Fat Websites (2021)
Author : HermanMartinus
Score : 88 points
Date : 2022-05-23 08:59 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (herman.bearblog.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (herman.bearblog.dev)
| kkfx wrote:
| Hum, "blogs" in the past means "web logs" or a place to publish
| your personal sh^wcra^wehmmmm things you want someone else to
| know... I think the author intend for blogs "personal websites"
| witch sometimes have only one topic, sometimes few. I argue how
| they can be called blog and their substantial purpose.
|
| In the past, usenet pre-web era, there was a problem: some posts
| are just noise so there were not much reasons to pin them in some
| way, some are valuable and might be useful in the future to
| anyone including those who join a group _after_ that post(s). So
| websites was seen as a way to keep useful contents for the
| posterity. Than someone observe the old mundaneum dream [1] can
| be real with web tech and a new revolution start ending up not so
| well, composition is still manual and have many issues, accessing
| contents was a problem, directory-website prove to be nor
| effective nor maintainable. Than search engines arrives. Another
| revolution with another loss of the original web idea ... finally
| blogs arrives as a way to collect data about people letting them
| spit some mostly irrelevant content to nearly anyone on the web.
|
| I favor rediscovering the classic idea, perhaps the mid-classic
| one: personal websites with domain names, perhaps hosted at home
| and mirrored on ZeroNet for all who can, perhaps offering a local
| YaCy instance to contribute to an open web search to reduce
| hyper-power of corporate backed search engines, perhaps hosting
| something else for individual users usage from mail+webmail, VoIP
| services etc i.e. pushing the classic "home-server" concept since
| now most of the connected users can do that, can profit from
| that, at a little enough price, but please let's agree not only
| to simple script-less fast-loading without CDNs etc contents,
| also to kind of publishing. To avoid create another niche we new
| old web must be useful like:
|
| - some personal information made public, why a phone directory?
| If I have phone numbers to be published I put them on my website
| because accessing it must be just looking for my name and surname
| + eventual other tag/words in case of homonymy;
|
| - some topics I want to publish, with proper RSS feeds because
| 99% of the reader are mildly interested in a small percentage of
| the content so will not came back frequently to discover
| something new, they might just get it in their own "inbox" by a
| lighter mean than an email, or perhaps not having aliases by a
| mean that do not demand a mail/alias to retrieve contents;
|
| - support for various media, not only desktop and mobile but also
| scrapers, screen readers, terminals etc, a website must be used
| ok-ish with w3m.
|
| Long story short instead of a crapload of contents lets makes
| personal websites like our public face to the web, with all non-
| web hooks of the case, like RSS.
|
| We need such tools to made a social society without social
| networks, but still modern.
|
| [1] The ~1930 web based on cards and telegraphs depicted and
| partially made by Paul Otlet and Henry La Fontaine
| detay wrote:
| And they have to have a publish date. (You wouldn't believe the
| number of blog posts that do not have one)
| cehrlich wrote:
| The irony of it is that if Google's algorithm made sense at all
| (Why is a recipe being downranked for being older than one
| year?), people wouldn't have to do all of this stuff.
|
| It's a vicious circle and I don't know if it's possible to
| escape at this point by any means other than inventing a better
| search algorithm and convincing a large number of people to use
| it.
| pvorb wrote:
| That number is billions of people, which means that it's not
| going to happen.
| searchableguy wrote:
| That's because of SEO and perception reasons, I believe. It's
| intentional.
| jl6 wrote:
| You are correct - this is an attempt to appear fresh. But it
| is no excuse. It's still an anti-user dark pattern.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Fully agree. Also you can appear fresh regardless _if you
| are actually fresh_, simply by adding an review/update
| date.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Or if you're not, just use a cron to keep the dates fresh
| jrwoodruff wrote:
| But... then what's the point of a date at all? May as
| well not have one.
| wrycoder wrote:
| I should have used /sarc
|
| The idea was to fool people and bots into thinking it was
| fresh!
| ratww wrote:
| Yep. It is an intention to appear fresh _to Google_ , so
| that it can rank above websites that have better content
| but are using dates. Users be damned.
| [deleted]
| nixcraft wrote:
| I agree. When I started with nixCraft, the first feedback was
| that visitors wanted to know the last updated date. Apart from
| that, having comments, RSS feed and newsletter subscription is
| essential. Please don't say follow me on Twitter or FB. That is
| like giving out free advertisements to social media, which
| hides your content from all followers who choose to follow you
| because of your blog post. I have over 250k+ followers on both
| FB and Twitter, but as soon as they see a link to my blog post,
| promote this post button appears.So please encourage your RSS
| and email newsletter subscription. Keep independent web alive.
| fleddr wrote:
| "Text is small" so a website should be extremely light in
| resources is a really simplistic way to go about things.
|
| Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page, they're part of
| a CMS with a million other capabilities. Or, the team creating
| the website was under cost pressure and went for some
| performance-compromised "good enough" solution. Or, the website
| is old (true for almost all of them) and no longer under serious
| active maintenance.
|
| It's not just incompetence leading to technical bloat.
|
| The same is true for some of the "dark patterns" like auto-
| playing videos and pop-ups. We should stop with the narrative
| that this is due to publication truly hating users or being
| completely tone-deaf. It's purposefully done because it works. It
| serves marketing and monetary goals.
|
| Yes, this comes at the expense of usability. You should see it as
| an act of desperation that is existential. It keeps the lights
| on. The terrible state of web usability is due to it not having
| any reliable business model other than the current status quo.
| grishka wrote:
| A CMS, fundamentally, is a server application that pulls things
| out of the database, puts them into templates, and spits the
| resulting HTML out to the browser. There is no inherent reason
| why a page that comes out of a feature-rich CMS has to be
| bloated.
| [deleted]
| jasonshaev wrote:
| Under that definition of a CMS I agree, however I think what
| you are describing is an MVP of a CMS that would require
| additional features and (likely) bloat to truly be useful to
| most publications.
|
| Examples: Social Media integrations
| Subscriptions integration Advertisements + trackers
| (which will likely pull in additional garbage)
| Analytics (GA, etc.) Comment section + moderation tools
| Media: images, videos Font(s) Responsiveness
|
| It CAN all add up fast unless someone is keeping track and
| responsible for keeping these sites lean.
| mro_name wrote:
| > It's not just incompetence leading to technical bloat.
|
| it's bad decisions after all. How would you call that? Alien
| invasion?
| rimliu wrote:
| > Most web pages are not hand crafted page by page, >
| they're part of a CMS with a million other capabilities
|
| Why should it matter? By this token a car should weight about
| as much as the a factory that made it.
| capableweb wrote:
| Not necessarily the weight, but lots of other attributes of
| cars and other factory-made products are the way they are
| just because of the process in the factory. Sometimes to make
| production itself cheaper (not just material cost, but
| process-wise), sometimes to make it more efficient and
| sometimes just because automating it fully with good results
| is impossible, compared to making it by hand.
| leokennis wrote:
| Beautiful analogy.
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| My electric kettle recently broke. When I got into the guts
| of it, I noticed there were a lot of weird components that
| weren't really used, or didn't seem that useful. When I
| searched youtube for help, I found out those components were
| for kettles with a physical on/off switch. Mine didn't have
| the switch, but everything else on the inside was still
| there.
| andai wrote:
| That's funny. It must have been cheaper to use the board
| they already had than to make a new one with less stuff on
| it.
| aledthemathguy wrote:
| financial incentives.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| Most of the JS on a blog site will be analytics, don't hate the
| playa ...
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| (including the site this article is hosted at)
| josephg wrote:
| Why not hate the player? I loaded an article the other day, and
| before I could read a single word the page had two popovers -
| one asking about cookies and the other asking if I wanted to
| join their mailing list, "So you can read more great content
| like this!".
|
| Terrible websites make me angry and then get closed. What a
| horrible waste of our collective human potential.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| Then create a blog without using any of this tech and you'll
| soon realise it goes nowhere.
| josephg wrote:
| I have a blog without any of that junk and it works out
| great. I get ~50k unique visitors on most of my posts,
| which I'm very happy with.
| spicybright wrote:
| Somewhat agree, but the game puts websites in a very tough
| place.
|
| If you're depending on writing articles for income, either
| you do the dark patterns and scrape by, or you run out of
| money and close shop.
|
| For news reports it's even worse because there's heavy
| incentive to use low quality sources for your posts.
|
| I hate proposing yet another subscription service, but it
| would be much more bearable for everyone to have a netflix
| style model.
|
| Flat rate a month in exchange for free access to quality news
| and content without the dark patterns.
|
| I'm certinaly not holding my breath on that happening though.
| OezMaster wrote:
| I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the author created
| https://justsketch.me/, which sponsors
| http://reference.sketchdaily.net/
|
| I found these to be great resources for drawing exercises.
| [deleted]
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| And this blog actually loads fast and does not require me to
| trust random third-party scripts to be able to see text. Good
| job!
| kretaceous wrote:
| Yes! You should check out https://bearblog.dev, developed by
| the OP.
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| Lol the irony of this. Very slow TTFB from Australia.. over 1
| second
|
| The blog is already behind Cloudflare, and this page is static
| content, why don't you just add a rule to cache the page?
| dgb23 wrote:
| Not sure, but might be using a free plan, as many do. It would
| only load from a hot cache in your region on subsequent hits
| and have other such limitations to make it affordable.
| john-doe wrote:
| I have 1 second to spare. Optimization is good, but shaving
| milliseconds at all costs always sounded a bit pointless to me,
| except for real-time audio communication.
| Jamie9912 wrote:
| Do you have 5 seconds to spare? 10 seconds to spare?
| klibertp wrote:
| The question is more how often rather than how long. For
| example, this page: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manu
| al/html_mono/elisp.ht... takes nearly 15 seconds to fully
| load for me, but then I can live for literally weeks
| without having to refresh it (ie. other than on sporadic
| Firefox restart). That's quite obviously different in the
| 1/10-of-chapter-per-page style of docs that Rust books seem
| to like.
| TAKEMYMONEY wrote:
| Minimalism is "subtract until it breaks" and this is reaching the
| breaking point.
|
| Of course, we all hate popovers, slow websites etc, we've known
| this for decades.
|
| This website has _no_ identity other than an emoji and the fact
| that it 's purposefully lacking design beyond basic text styling.
| It looks like 1000 other sites, at a glance I can't tell what
| this website or article are about.
|
| And there are _still_ elements I want to get rid of! "Toast me"
| button, "Like and subscribe!," the ad for the CMS, analytics
| script etc.
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| Well, HN has many of these elements but is unique. Maybe a
| maverick? Also, bit unfair there is no exclamation after
| subscribe.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >This website has no identity other than an emoji
|
| Assuming you mean the little running guy composed of unicode
| characters (and the bear face in the link at the bottom), the
| actual term is _kaomoji_. Emoji are specifically little images.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon#Japanese_(kaomoji)
|
| http://kaomoji.ru/en/
| [deleted]
| D13Fd wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but "stock photos" are not a problem.
|
| They add visual interest and allow the reader to quickly see what
| the article is about. Having a good stock photo with a blog post
| drastically increases the number of clicks.
|
| Yes they can be used incorrectly, but that's true of anything.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I found it particularly ironic given he specifically used the
| example of Harry Potter, "a pretty thick book" being only
| "about 500kb of text", despite the fact that the actually book
| (the _physical object_ he specifically picks as his metaphor)
| has pictures at the start of every chapter, not to mention the
| custom fonts and typesetting. You would need way more than
| 500kb to represent the actual book.
| csw-001 wrote:
| I won't read articles on cybersecurity if I don't see a either
| a bad guy in a hoodie hunched over a laptop, or (even better) a
| neon blue padlock in front of a Matrix style screen saver.
| Those are the dead give-away that an article is worth your
| time, otherwise it's really anybody's guess as to the content
| quality.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I believe the author had intended to link to this[0] page
| instead.
|
| [0]: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
| icemelt8 wrote:
| dncornholio wrote:
| _every website_ should load fast. If they should be clean is
| something that 's too subjective IMO.
| noisymemories wrote:
| I'm fully aware I'm a rather mediocre frontend developer so my
| opinion on the matter has very little value, but on the other
| hand I have this feeling that HTML, CSS and JS on the hindsight
| were probably some of the _least suitable_ technological
| choices for what the current usage of the web actually needs to
| achieve this objective.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| There was once the idea, that the web could work like other
| objects in programming. You would download an object and then
| send it messages (message passing concept). I think this was
| imagined to be in some kind of Smalltalk image like
| environment. I think Alan Kay mentioned the idea in one of
| his talks, or I have read about it elsewhere related to
| Smalltalk.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The triad of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are actually fantastic
| for the web _if used intelligently_. Unfortunately the "used
| intelligently" part is skipped way more often than it should
| be.
|
| Having HTML be the first resource at a URL is awesome. HTML
| can have lots of "invisible" metadata for a variety of user
| agents. Not every user agent is a graphical browser wanting
| to run arbitrary code. The microbrowsers that generate
| previews when shared by messaging apps have different needs
| than a graphical desktop browser which has different needs
| than a screen reader. The same HTML can serve all the user
| agents "for free".
|
| Sticking styling and interactivity into separate resources
| let's the user agent figure out what it needs to load. A
| screen reader likely doesn't care about images, a phone might
| load a custom CSS based on a media tag, and a microbrowser
| wants the OpenGraph data in the header.
|
| HTML also makes it trivial to point readers to different
| sections of itself so a user agent can jump to a relevant
| part of the page. So you get hyperlinks between documents and
| even specific sections of documents.
|
| HTML is not perfect but it's great for documents. Even full
| JavaScript apps should at _least_ provide a skeleton of HTML
| saying they need JavaScript to run and give non-graphical
| user agents pointers to appropriate resources. Much of the
| content of the web would work just fine as documents and does
| not need to be constructed on the client with megabytes of
| JavaScript and hundreds of calls to different resources.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Autoplay videos blinking ads and basically any dynamic content
| have no place on a text-based website.
| dncornholio wrote:
| Autoplay videos have no place on any website.
|
| If my blog needs a video or dynamic content, it's not up to
| you to decide ;).
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| It'd be rather inconvenient if YouTube _didn 't_ autoplay
| the video I just clicked. It'd be tedious to have to click
| play every time.
| westcort wrote:
| This bookmarklet is one way to cut out the cruft:
|
| javascript:void%20function()%7Bjavascript:(function()%7Bvar%20a=M
| ath.floor,b=document.querySelectorAll(%22p,%20title%22),c=%5B%5D,
| e=%22%22,f=%22%22,g=%22%22,h=0,k=0,l=%22%22,m=%22%22,n=window.ope
| n(%22%22,%22_blank%22);for(var%20d%20in%20b)%7Bvar%20i=b%5Bd%5D.t
| extContent;i%26%26(c=c+%22%5Cn%22+i)%7Dfor(f=c,e=f.replace(/%5Cn/
| g,%22%20%3Cbr%3E%3C/br%3E%20%22),g=e.split(%22%20%22),h=0;h%3Cg.l
| ength;h++)k=a(g%5Bh%5D.length/3)+1,l=%22%3Cspan%20style='font-wei
| ght:bolder'%3E%22+g%5Bh%5D.substring(0,k)+%22%3C/span%3E%3Cspan%2
| 0style='font-weight:lighter'%3E%22+g%5Bh%5D.substring(k,g%5Bh%5D.
| length)+%22%3C/span%3E%20%22,%22.%22==g%5Bh%5D.substring(g%5Bh%5D
| .length-1,g%5Bh%5D.length)%26%26(l+=%22%3Cspan%20style='color:red
| '%3E%20 _%20%3C /span%3E%22),m+=l;n.document.write(%22%3Chtml%3E%
| 3Cp%20style='background-color:%23EDD1B0;font-size:40;line-
| height:200%25;font-
| family:Arial'%3E%22+m+%22%3C/p%3E%3C/html%3E%22)%7D)()%7D();
|
| And another one that doesn't make bold text on the first third of
| words:
|
| javascript:void%20function()%7Bjavascript:(function()%7Bvar%20a=M
| ath.floor,b=document.querySelectorAll(%22p,%20title%22),c=%5B%5D,
| e=%22%22,f=%22%22,g=%22%22,h=0,k=0,l=%22%22,m=%22%22,n=window.ope
| n(%22%22,%22_blank%22);for(var%20d%20in%20b)%7Bvar%20i=b%5Bd%5D.t
| extContent;i%26%26(c=c+%22%5Cn%22+i)%7Dfor(f=c,e=f.replace(/%5Cn/
| g,%22%20%3Cbr%3E%3C/br%3E%20%22),g=e.split(%22%20%22),h=0;h%3Cg.l
| ength;h++)k=a(g%5Bh%5D.length/3)+1,l=%22%3Cspan%20style='font-wei
| ght:light'%3E%22+g%5Bh%5D.substring(0,k)+%22%3C/span%3E%3Cspan%20
| style='font-weight:light'%3E%22+g%5Bh%5D.substring(k,g%5Bh%5D.len
| gth)+%22%3C/span%3E%20%22,%22.%22==g%5Bh%5D.substring(g%5Bh%5D.le
| ngth-1,g%5Bh%5D.length)%26%26(l+=%22%3Cspan%20style='color:red'%3
| E%20_%20%3C/span%3E%22),m+=l;n.document.write(%22%3Chtml%3E%3Cp%2
| 0style='background-color:%23EDD1B0;font-size:40;line-
| height:200%25;font-
| family:Arial'%3E%22+m+%22%3C/p%3E%3C/html%3E%22)%7D)()%7D();
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > One thing we need to understand when building websites
| optimised for reading is that text is small. Harry Potter and the
| Deathly Hallows is a pretty thick book by most measures, and only
| clocks in at about 500kb of text. How is it that this review of
| 1/18th of the book on Medium is 5.4 times the size of the entire
| book?
|
| I copy-pasted the HTML source for the review in a new file and
| it's 20kb. So if it was a full review it would be a 360kb file.
| Uncompressed, unlike epub files. Once compressed it is ~6kb.
| 6kb*18 = 108kb. I wouldn't read a book review that is 1/5th of
| the original material or I wouldn't call it a book review but I
| digress.
|
| Anyway, should we include the e-reader's viewer code to know how
| much information is used to display the book and compare it to
| the CMS's code or the code of the full page of the review to
| compare... what ?
| rerx wrote:
| Where does the "1/18th of the book" come from?
|
| The medium article has a "(18/52)" in the title, but that
| rather seems to indicate that the article is number 18 in a
| series of 52 (weekly book reviews in a year or so).
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Totally missed that !
| buro9 wrote:
| > I copy-pasted the HTML source for the review in a new file
| and it's 20kb.
|
| I opened it in a browser and hit F12, viewed the network panel
| and hit refresh... it is 3.41 MB.
|
| You can do this on the web with Web Page Test... here's the
| result for the page in question:
| https://www.webpagetest.org/result/220523_AiDc6H_8YW/
|
| That page takes on average 20 seconds to display... and what it
| loads to show a tiny bit of text is pretty mind-blowing:
| https://www.webpagetest.org/result/220523_AiDc6H_8YW/1/detai...
|
| It shows 124 requests, and a total weight of 1,588KB sent
| across the network (some of which is compressed, so I think
| this is the reason the browser shows more weight)
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Here's the code: https://ctxt.io/2/AADgpNP9FA for the review.
|
| Now I do agree with you, Medium uses way too much data around
| its core content.
| damir wrote:
| If you are on wordpress, there's ton of "minimal" themes to
| choose from, here's a HN discussion of one minimal theme (susty
| wp):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17513447
| qudat wrote:
| I totally agree with the sentiment of this post. Bear blog
| inspired me to build https://lists.sh which has been a blast to
| build. The goal is to foster a smaller web.
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(page generated 2022-05-23 23:02 UTC)