[forg0t_username]

The irony is palpable here... The website loads slowly, elements move around the page during the first load, then the fonts blink around and go from system font to some custom font. It loads data from 15 different domains, and four of those are only for tracking.

[michaelmcmillan]

True, but hypocrisy does not have much bearing on the validity of the arguments.

2 + 2 is 4 regardless of Hitler claiming it over Feynman.

[alien_at_work]

That's not entirely true and your analogy is not comparable. Person A makes a claim that X is good and everyone should be doing it. Person A does the opposite of X. That doesn't prove one way or the other the truth of the arguments but it does call into question what the goal is with the arguments. There could be many reasons for such a discrepancy but a common one is manipulation.

As an example, if a crypo currency executive says their coin is fantastic and everyone should invest in it, but sells their entire holding does one not question the goals of such a statement? Note: this example is also not directly applicable to this article (at least I hope it isn't) but it's closer than your example was.

[michaelmcmillan]

I will concede that it is not completely analogous. But you are talking about something else, namely the value of the intent behind a claim.

As I argued, intent has no bearing on the truth value of the claim, but it can – as you point out – be correlated with the truth value. I stand by that dismissing an argument based on intent is fallacious. You have to honestly deal with an argument – regardless of the messenger – to assess its truth value.

[alien_at_work]

I don't disagree but I also don't see where that was suggested. The OP just pointed out the radical difference between what was preached and what was practiced. This could be seen as a dismissal but it could just as easily be seen as a call to action or just pointing out something amusing.

[michaelmcmillan]

Sorry, I did not mean to straw man you. Re-reading your comment I realize that you didn't disagree, but were rather pointing out something else.

[trhway]

i'd argue that it is different 2s and different 4s.

[jetheredge]

Author here... yeah, we are loading a lot of crap, aren't we? We will do an audit and make sure we aren't loading a bunch of unnecessary stuff, but the whole site should be served up through a CDN, sorry it is loading slow for you.

[masklinn]

The page triggers 50 HTTP queries and is 3.85MB, so a CDN is only going to do so much.

* the base page is light but has very high latency (250ms)

* there's an almost-empty CSS (style.css) next to one which seems a bit overwrought (screen.css, 140KB is a lot for a CSS file), oh plus normalize from cloudflare despite it apparently already being included in screen.css

* you're loading 9 different JS files from your CDN, plus some emoji crap from not your CDN

* typekit accounts for 1 JS query followed by fetching 12 different font files, at 15~30K each

* 14 different queries to "driftt.com" whatever the fuck that is though I expect some sort of analytics/tracking crap given

* tracking & analytics & ancillary service queries up the ass: hubspot (4), facebook (4), google analytics (2), drift.com (2), others (5)

* the Lato CSS from google fonts but apparently not the font itself, on the other hand you're loading "larsseit.otf" from your CDN, maybe pick just one?

[SAI_Peregrinus]

It also works perfectly fine with all 3rd-party requests blocked (via uMatrix) for me. So other than the CSS none of what you mentioned is necessary to get a readable article.

[Traubenfuchs]

How does something like that even happen? Did someone copy and paste lots and lots of stuff together to end up with this abomination?

[walshemj]

50 is quite low I was auditing a big uk ecommerce site at the weekend and the homepage had over 170 elements

[masklinn]

> 50 is quite low

50 could be "quite low" if most of the requests were for "content" images. TFA has under half a dozen images, as I've outlined in my comment most of the requests are for ancillary garbage.

> I was auditing a big uk ecommerce site at the weekend and the homepage had over 170 elements

See above, 170 is pretty high but assuming at least one image request per product[0] plus a few more for buttons & the like, having a large number of requests would be understandable for an ecommerce site.

ecommerce sites would also be a place where:

1. analytics is very, very understandable

2. the site would use a pretty generic system which could hinder specific optimisations

3. assuming the user will browse around, the site could preload various stuff, sacrificing some upfront performance for a nicer "inside" experience

All in all, I'd be much more understanding of that than 50 request on a blog post, even more so a blog post on software complexity. Incidentally, the amazon.com home page generates ~250 requests.

[0] because spriting for web pages remains a pain in the ass, doubly so for JPEG

[rvader]

Take some inspiration from here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120112045920/http://codethinke...

[ronnier]

I'm really turned off by the huge header fad.

[zzzcpan]

And yet works perfectly fine without javascript and adblocker didn't even need to block a single request.

But the content is meh, I couldn't finish reading it and found your comment more interesting than the whole article.

[ce4]

it's a subtle live demo ;-)