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I think this is a fine ideal for some websites but not a universal truth. For example I love the plaintextsports.com website and check it near daily on my phone, and it does a perfect job. And of course I agree that there is a lot of bloat especially around marketing / tracking snippets that slow things down and don't provide the end users with any upside. But there are also plenty of times when I don't want the minimalistic approach the author argues for. Not everything on the web needs to be the equivalent of a printed black and white pamphlet. Modern web offers so much potential for unique interactive experiences, storytelling, media sharing, etc that isn't available in print or other content mediums. Often I want to watch high res videos, or see detailed photos that I can zoom in on and appreciate the details. I want interactive JS experiences like the wonderful ciechanow.ski explanation tools. I want dynamic pages like a tip calculator or the daily wordle or a Photoshop like webapp, that I can save and use entirely offline. Sometimes I want a heavy gif filled homage to GeoCities, or a hypertext comic that blends in micro games and animations as part of the storytelling. I might want to check out a cutting edge 3d experience that only works with a special Chrome beta flag turned on. Sure, a subset of users on old hardware might not be able to enjoy it the same, but at the same time we have more computing power and faster connetions than we've ever had before, and to not use any of it would be a waste. The web I want is full of unique and different experiences, even if they're "suboptimal" in some way. There may be times when a SPA is heavy or unnecessary, but there are also plenty of times when it makes almost no noticeable difference to me if there's a couple extra megabytes on a blog page. If their vision or workflow is built around client-side heavy React rather than HTMX that's fine, that's what they were comfortable working with, and they were still inspired to make the site and share it with me often for free (and of course there would be tradeoffs to any other approach, like more round-trips to the server for minor interactions, or not being able to do fun page transitions, or whatever else). |