OT: Flash and Javascript (Was: Taunting)

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Sun May 24 11:43:57 PDT 2009


"grauzone" <none at example.net> wrote in message 
news:gvbr5u$1671$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> browsers. What's the big deal everyone have with Javascript?
>
> It's unnecessary, annoying, slower, and adds security holes.
>
> When using Firefox, I usually use NoScript to block all scripts by 
> default. Sometimes, some minor things don't work, and I have to enable JS. 
> Now it's really rare to see functionality that couldn't be provided 
> without JS. Rather, web designers seem to be really dumb and do stuff like 
> replacing real links by script functions. As a prime example take YouTube. 
> It's like YouTube doesn't believe in a life without AJAX! The simplest 
> things don't work anymore. What for?
>
> About AJAX, you know it breaks the back button and all other sorts of 
> practical things you are used from normal web browsing. And occasionally, 
> they use it for animations. Animations what for? They only introduce 
> artificial GUI latency. (You know, Win 3.11 feels faster.) A related 
> example for annoying AJAX things are those "applet" like boxes, that 
> contain a "loading" gif, and apparently loads a HTML subtree using AJAX.
>
> For completely over-engineered AJAX waste look at the Tango docs on 
> dsource. I mean, it emulates frames, and the end result is worse than with 
> good old frames! Ah yes, we all know frames are "outdated", but AJAX is 
> hip and new! Let's emulate frames, because we feel it's too slow to reload 
> the whole page again! (Now now, I wonder if the Tango docs even require a 
> webserver. Maybe that's the reason why there's no downloadable 
> documentation? But maybe I'm blaming the wrong thing here.)
>
> They told use not to use <blink> or <marquee>? OK, we'll just use JS!
>
> Among the best uses of JS I've seen are snow flakes moved by a script.
>
> /rant (I feel better now.)

Yes, yes, yes. This. All of it.

To add a little though, grauzone says "You know, Win 3.11 feels faster." My 
486 Win 3.11 machine *was* faster (not in terms of raw operations per second 
of course, but in terms of responsiveness.) My machine has a clockspeed in 
the GHz range, RAM in the GB range, and basic text entry in my browser 
frequently lags by at least a second. WTF? My 486/Win3.11 machine never did 
that! Hell, my Apple IIc never did that.

About 5-10 years ago, it was common, standard practice to design web pages 
so that they didn't take any more than about a couple seconds to load. But 
now, most of the pages on the web easily take about 5-10 seconds or more, 
and nobody seems to give a shit. In fact, I just timed how long it takes to 
load the main page of Tango's 0.9.9.8 API docs: it took a full 19 seconds. I 
timed it again with JS disabled: 2 seconds. I don't see how anyone can 
consider anything remotely that bad to be at all acceptable, particularly 
considering that the JS version does absolutely nothing that can't be 
reasonably done without JS (except for the folding/unfolding of the tree 
nodes, but you know, whoop-dee-f&^%ing-doo. I'm pretty sure I can live 
without that).

And then there's those modal in-page popups... You know, there was a time 
when people were aware that popups were bad. But hell, make them modal (ie, 
cause them to render the underlying page completely unresponsive) and stick 
them inside the page, and all of a sudden they're great! (/sarcasm, of 
course).

DHTML and Flash *are* the new 
blinks/marquees/animating-GIFs/embedded-sounds, but with two additional 
drawbacks: 1. There's no longer anyone on the web intelligent enough to 
recognize the *exact same* obnoxiousness problems that led to the downfall 
of the those 90's-web abominations, and 2. They're orders of magnitude 
slower (and don't get me started on Chrome or Opera). Sure, unlike the old 
90's-web abominations, they do have a *few* good uses. But that in 
absolutely no way excuses the bad stuff. And, (and here's the real 
clincher), since I obviously can't enforce proper design on the web, the one 
thing I *can* do is just simply disable that shit. So I do. And as you can 
already tell, I'm far from the only one.




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