[OT] HTML: div/iframe hybrid?

Fri Feb 27 14:34:28 PST 2015

On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 01:53:10PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 02/27/2015 02:17 AM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >
> >but in the webdev world, sometimes it's all about unreasonable
> >deadlines and shipping it as fast as possible.
> 
> Well, that's not just webdev, that's true in just about any commercial
> software development. "Hey, the sales guys just sold (nonexistent)
> feature X and promised it by (absurd) time Y, so go do it."

Point.

> >When Opera ditched Presto, I died a little inside. Back in the day,
> >Presto was the only serious alternative to the other major offerings
> >(I even introduced Opera to my non-techie cousin and she liked it!),
> >and was the only one that offered the level of configurability that I
> >liked.  In the early days it was also slim and fast, though it
> >started bloating up toward the final days.  But then Opera died and
> >went the way of Chrome and now we're stuck with the IMO inferior
> >choices.
> >
> 
> Yea, choice is good. Can't say I was surprised by what happened to
> opera though. I was more surprised (impressed) that a paid web browser
> managed to stay afloat for as long as it did, in the face of free
> browsers packaged with every OS.

Well, it was only paid for the first few years, and thereafter it became
free (as in gratis). The desktop version, that is. IIRC they were trying
to make their income by selling the mobile version on handhelds. They
might have had prebundling deals with some manufacturers, I'm not 100%
sure.

[...]
> Another part of the time warp: Remember how developers used to
> actually *care* about from-click-to-fully-rendered page loading times?
> My how I miss that.

Yeah!!! Those were the glory days of Opera, that sported some of the
fastest click-to-fully-rendered times. The original Presto engine was
super lightweight too, compared to the lard-laden monstrosity that was
Mozilla. *And* it was one of the most standards-compliant. (To the point
MSIE fanboys were complaining that their "pixel-perfect" websites
weren't rendering "correctly" in Opera. It was *too*
standards-compliant!!)

> My library's (off-the-shelf) web inventory system, when viewed on my
> phone, takes about a full minute to respond to clicks (erm, "taps") -
> even just on ordinary form fields. 'Course, that's an extreme example,
> but more generally, devs don't pay one bit of attention to page
> loading times. The theory is that AJAX's partial-page loading speeds
> things up because, well, you decrease the page download size by half
> of a kilobyte, and that's automagically faster than downloading a
> partial page, downloading a JS script, executing the JS script which
> then performs one of more AJAX requests to download other parts of the
> page separately, and then the browser finished piecing it together.
> Yea, brilliant "optimization". Sites loaded and performed faster back
> when I was on 56k. No exaggeration. And forward/back/bookmarking
> *always* worked correctly.

Yeah, nowadays there's an alarming rise of websites that rely on
JS-rendered controls that *already can be represented in HTML*. They
don't work with NoScript, they are slow because it's (1) JS and (2)
requires several AJAX roundtrips, *and* they are non-bookmarkable and
break well-established browser navigation functions. All while *exactly
the same thing* done in pure HTML works perfectly fine with NoScript,
loads superfast because they're part of the page so when the page is
downloaded they're all ready to go without needing additional JS
interpretation time (spent in concatenating HTML snippets that could've
been written into the page!) or AJAX roundtrips, and they integrate
seamlessly into standard browser navigation functions. But they're not
cool, because this isn't how people do things these days, and therefore
they're passé and ought to be replaced with something inferior. This, we
call "progress". Yup. Makes perfect sense to me! :-P

> Not too long ago, when discussing page load times, I actually had one
> web developer try to tell me that none of time spent executing onLoad
> JS and such actually counts because page loading is different from
> onLoad processing. I'm amazed that anyone could convince themselves
> that technical distinction would actually matter to the user.

Wow, that's really ... wow. I'm speechless. I blame it all on that time
machine!! :-P

> But I'm convinced the time warp extends back to the 80's (or more).
> Remember when content used to be inseparably tied to the specific
> application it was created with? Then we got standardized data formats
> and interoperability. It was an ENORMOUS improvement. And now that's
> nearly gone. I can install any of a hundred different video players,
> music players and image viewers. But they're all nearly useless
> because (without hacking) YouTube videos only run on YouTube's player,
> NetFlix videos are only viewable on NetFlix's player, Spotify is only
> playable on Spotify's player, Flicker images are only viewable through
> Flicker, etc., and they all actively PROTECT their lack of
> interoperability. This allegedly "modern" shit has sent us straight
> back to the computing stone age before there was such a thing as
> widespread interoperability. But the extra bitch of it is: All these
> wonderful B&D services are BUILT ON and RELY ON the interoperable
> stuff (like mpeg4, SQL DBs, etc) as their base! They couldn't
> realistically EXIST without taking advantage of interoperability!

Yeah, that's the 2015 version of Embrace, Extend, Exterminate... :-P

[...]
> >Nowadays, however, "content" is a rare commodity, a mere tool to be
> >hogged, controlled, and exploited to lure hapless netizens to
> 
> Yea. Like how there used to be article titles, but now links to
> articles will be truncated, making it look like they just ran out of
> space to fit the whole title. But the fact that it happens on
> literally *every* link, and that there obviously *is* enough space had
> they simply choosen to use it, proves it's a completely deliberate
> tactic to feign innocence while attempting to fool people into a
> click-thru to another ad-filled page because "Huh? Wait, what's the
> rest of it? 'Masquerada's gay characters are defined by...' By WHAT?!?
> Guess they couldn't fit something a short as a title, but I must know!
> I must click and find out!!" (ie, See the "See also" links at the
> bottom of every post on Joystiq or Engadget. It's every freaking link
> on... (see what I did there?))
[...]

Obligatory quote:

	It's amazing how careful choice of punctuation can leave you
	hanging:

T

-- 
There is no gravity. The earth sucks.