Redesign of dlang.org

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

(Argh! Accidentally emailed this to digitalmars-d at puremagic.com twice! 
Actually posting to NG now...)

On 4/23/2014 6:48 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
 >
 > until sometime in the last few
 > years I got so sick of JS eating up CPU, memory, causing needless
 > browser slowdowns, popping up unwanted ads and nag dialogs, that now I'm
 > back to JS being off by default, and only (grudgingly) enabled for a
 > handful of specific sites that actually *need* it. It's amazing how much
 > faster the web suddenly became, overnight.

That's why I do it! That plus the lack of modal CSS pop-in windows. 
(Seriously, no sooner do the browsers finally kill off popups, but then 
overzealous designers go replacing them with *modal* versions! And these 
new ones break basic browser functionality even *more*.)

The *truly* amazing thing is that many of those slow-with-JS sites are 
using JS/AJAX specifically *because* they actually believe it makes 
their site faster (I bet many of them are probably running on Node.js or 
PHP, too). Always, of course, based on the same half-baked, 
never-tested, but oft-repeated theory that reducing a few fractions of a 
kilobyte by doing partial page-reloads actually makes the web noticeably 
faster (yea right).

Shit, even in the days before 14.4 modems, let alone 56k or broadband, 
transferring the actual HTML was practically nothing, it was the 
occasional use of an image or two that slowed things down - *because 
those take a heck of a lot more bytes than HTML*. Even today, one 
gravitar image, one "share on site x" logo, or one stock photo of a 
model pretending to be an overjoyed IT worker, and *all* the 
partial-HTML savings are completely blown several times over. Not to 
mention all the extra CSS/HTML/JS used for rigging up a 
partial-reloading Web 2.0 "experience" in the first place.

And then there's sites that perform these performance "enhancing" AJAX 
requests *on initial page load*, which is just the definition of irony.


 > And it's equally amazing how
 > many links stop working without JS. It boggles the mind... doesn't HTML
 > have a built-in link tag for that very purpose?!
 >

Exactly. Speaking of which...

[Link Warning: Language and tone are probably NSFW, NSF-GitHub-Workers, 
and NSF-Humanity ;) ]

http://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/making-a-link-or-what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-github-s-developers

 > Another new fad nowadays seems to be CSS popups that need JS to make
 > them go away. My usual reaction to that is to close the tab and move on.
 > Or, if I'm feeling particularly tolerant that day, switch to user
 > stylesheet mode (i.e., completely disregard the site's CSS and use my
 > own), and just scour the raw text for the real content

I love this FF extension:

https://adblockplus.org/en/elemhidehelper

If I can't get rid of the garbage with that, the site's not worth 
spending another second on. I won't be bothered to even *think* about 
some poorly-made site's CSS, let alone touch any custom stylesheets.


 > (which usually
 > occupies, oh, 20% of the total text on the page -- apparently nowadays
 > minimizing your S/N ratio is in, providing useful content is out).

Yup. Makes me miss "markup".

But then I go back to my own site, type <b></b> instead of <span 
class="something-that-implicitly-says-font-weight-bold-in-the-css"></span>, 
and all is well. Bonus points for me whenever <b> offends anyone's sense 
of "proper" HTML. :)

As if <b> hasn't always implied the semantics of "emphasis" anyway...not 
that anyone's ever had any real use for semantic "which text is 
emphasized?" for any purpose besides "Should this text be rendered in 
bold/italic or not?"

Funny though...I've never heard any of the semantic-web-loving, <b>/etc 
haters complain about things like Markdown ;)


 > esp. since Google will readily give me pages upon pages of
 > other places where I can get similar information! >:-)
 >

Yea that's a big thing, too. So many designers actually believing their 
site is so special that people won't just move on or that being 
hitech-elitist won't hurt their site.


 > JS rants are fun. ;-)
 >

Heh, yea, it's an addiction :)