[simonw]

The point of blurry placeholders is to support loading a page with potentially hundreds of images (maybe with additional lazy loading, which doesn't need JavaScript these days) without blocking display of the page on loading those full images.

I'm not sure why you think it has anything to do with forcing people to execute JavaScript?

[wruza]

Can't speak for everyone ofc, but not sure if I ever wanted blurry placeholders when images load fast enough, or found them anything but annoying when not. I think these bells and whistles only serve as designer's self-affirmation.

[simonw]

I've definitely wanted them on photo galleries with large numbers of thumbnails, and I appreciate them when they are implemented well, especially if I'm on a slow connection.

[gblargg]

Agreed, they just create needless visual activity. How about a page specify where the images appear, and leave it up to the browser to decide how to show them and load them? Is that too simple and workable?

[jasonkester]

Indeed. So the visitor need only wait for the 20mb javascript bundle, but not the 600kb of images, before he can see the 1kb of text that he visited the site to read.

[simonw]

Sounds like you're in favor of a version of blurry placeholders that's implemented in less than 1KB of CSS.