| 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. |
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!"