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by k33l0r 5385 days ago
It amazes me how many high traffic sites seemingly can't be bothered to test their sites with YSlow or Google Page Speed.

For example, The Post gets a D from Yslow, as does Techcrunch, but they aren't the worst of the pack as ReadWriteWeb gets an abysmal F.
1 comments
blauwbilgorgel 5385 days ago
I was amazed too. Also at this public sneer from an editor: Won't developers feel responsible for this?

They again, they include javascript files with a copyright from 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/sites/twpweb/js/wp_omniture...). They source javascript files of 5 lines of length. They forget alt attributes on navigation images. And they wrap their stories in this soup:

  #wrapperMainCenter, #wrapperInternalCenter, #container, #pagebody, #pagebody-inner, #article, .blog_entry, #c-main-content, #center, .content, .hnews hentry item
That can't be result of a single developer, or even of a single project.

There currently is nothing to fix when - to keep advertising and tracking going - you are faced with over 100.000 bytes of third party javascript code (I stopped counting).

Next to a complete redesign, a mentality change would be needed. Sure, you can asynchronously load a single compressed and combined core javascript resource just before <body> close. But would the advertisement department of The Washing Post be happy if all advertisements showed up 5 seconds after the content has loaded?

I wouldn't even know where to start bothering with this massive site. There must be 10+ projects with different developers all working over the years to build things like the Sports Section, the classifieds section etc. All using their own javascripts and style sheets... Perhaps a good CDN to patch this oil tanker.

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thwarted 5385 days ago
But would the advertisement department of The Washing Post be happy if all advertisements showed up 5 seconds after the content has loaded?

I can almost see how that conversation could go down. "Our users are staring at half-rendered content during the 15 seconds our site takes to load! Scramble the web team! That's blank real estate that could use some ads on it!"

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