[usrbinbash]

The sad part is, how infinitely more functional these simple, static HTML documents are, compared to much of the shit that floods the "modern" web.

Ofc these pages cannot replace SPAs. That's not the point. The point is: Much of the web isn't SPAs. And much of what is SPAs shouldn't be SPAs. Much of the web is displaying static, or semi-static information. Hell, much of the web is still text.

But somehow, the world accepted that displaying 4KB of text somehow has to require transmitting 32MiB of data, much of it arbitrary code that has no earthly business eating my CPU cycles, as the new normal. Somehow everyone accepts that text-only informational pages need to abuse the scroll-event, or display giant hero-banners. Somehow, having a chatbot-popup on a restaurants menu-page is a must (because ofc I wanna talk to some fuckin LLM wrapper about the fries they sell!!!), but a goddamn page denoting the places address and telephone number is nowhere to be found.

https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

This talk was given over a decade ago, and its takeaways are as relevant today as thy were back then, and in fact maybe even more so.

[moring]

> Somehow everyone accepts

Everyone did accept that because when you needed information from a page that pulls that shit, you don't have a choice, and when you did have a choice, all the others did it too.

Nowadays people just ask ChatGPT for the information they need so they don't have to visit those awful sites anymore.

[demetris]

Some of the stuff we have been adding since then is GOOD though.

Some examples:

We now have to accommodate all types of user agents, and we do that very well.

We now have complex navigation menus that cannot be accessible without JavaScript, and we do that very well.

Our image elements can now have lots of attributes that add a bit of weight but improve the experience a lot.

Etc.

Also, things are improving/self-correcting. I saw a listing the other day for senior dev with really good knowledge of the vanilla stuff. The company wants to cut down on the use of their FE framework of choice.

I cannot remember seeing listings like that in 2020 or 2021.

PS.

I did not mean this reply as a counterpoint.

What I meant to say is, even if we leave aside the SPAs that should not be SPAs, we see the problem in simple document pages too. We have been adding lots of stuff there too. Some is good but some is bad.

[1718627440]

> We now have to accommodate all types of user agents, and we do that very well.

Simple websites don't even care about the UA.

> We now have complex navigation menus that cannot be accessible without JavaScript, and we do that very well.

Is there an actual menu which is more than a tree? Because a dir element that gets rendered by the UA into native menu controls would be just so much better.

[demetris]

Websites do care about the UA. They don’t care, at least most don’t care, about the User-Agent string. That is different.

About an element that gets rendered into native menu controls, I am not sure. I haven’t been following closely for the last two or three years. But that seems like a good candidate for a native element. 9 out 10 websites need it.