Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Mon Mar 12 21:52:12 PDT 2012


"Ary Manzana" <ary at esperanto.org.ar> wrote in message 
news:jjmhja$3a$2 at digitalmars.com...
> On 03/12/2012 10:58 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>
>> The problem today is that JS is the "next cool thing", so everyone is
>> jumping on the bandwagon, and everything from a single-page personal
>> website to a list of links to the latest toaster oven requires JS to
>> work, even when it's not necessary at all. That's the silliness of it
>> all.
>>
>>
>> T
>
> It's not the next cool thing. It makes thing more understandable for the 
> user. And it makes the web transfer less content,

That gets constantly echoed throughout the web, but it's a red herring: Even 
if you handle it intelligently like Adam does (ie, lightweight), the amount 
of data transfer saved is trivial. We're talking *part* of *one* measly HTML 
file here. And even that can be gzipped: HTML compresses *very* well. Yes, 
techincally it can be less transfer, but only negligably so. And bandwith is 
the *only* possible realistic improvement here, not speed, because the speed 
of even a few extra K during a transfer that was already going to happen 
anyway is easily outweighed by the overhead of things like actually making a 
round-trip to the server at all, plus likely querying a server-side DB, plus 
interpreting JS, etc.

If, OTOH you handle it like most people do, and not like Adam does, then for 
brief visits you can actually be tranferring *more* data just because of all 
that excess JS boilerplate people like to use. (And then there's the 
start-up cost of actually parsing all that boilerplate and then executing 
their initialization portions. And in many cases there's even external JS 
getting loaded in, etc.)

The problem with optimization is that it's not a clear-cut thing: If you're 
not looking at it holistically, optimizing one thing can either be an 
effective no-op or even cause a larger de-optimization somewhere else. So 
just because you've achived the popular goal of "less data transer" upon 
your user clicking a certain link, doesn't necessarily mean you've won a net 
gain, or even broken even.

> and leverages server processing time. It's the next step. It's not a 
> backwards step. :-P
>

It's the *newer* step. It may be "the future", but that's irrelevent: The 
question here is whether it's *good*, not whether it's popular or 
ubiquitous. Most real-world uses of it *are*, objectively, backwards steps.

> I figure then Google people are just all a bunch of idiots who just like 
> JS a lot...

Probably not all of them, but for the most part I frequently get that 
impression. Plus, keep in mind too, they have a *clear vested interest* in 
treating the web as a platform. Their whole business model relies on the web 
being treating as a platform. That, in turn, creates a (self-serving) need 
for them to push JS *regardless* of JS's merit. Without ubiquitus JS, the 
web has an even harder time competing with real platforms, and that pulls 
the rug out from under Google. They *are* a major corporation, never forget 
that.




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