Read through again, I’m not saying you can’t have much of that functionality.
I’m basically saying don’t use 300k of javascript that relies on 200k of libraries to do 20-40k’s job or worse, CSS’ job. Don’t use 400k of images to do 40-50k’s job… don’t use anything that changes how the browser normally behaves as that will annoy and confuse users to the point they’ll go looking for ways to stop said behaviors. Don’t blow 100k of HTML on 5k of plaintext when 10k of HTML will do the EXACT SAME job just as well if not BETTER.
… and I quote:
That 4k apiece BTW being without minification… and that 279k still relying on some other fat bloated library to even work in the first place – SHEER IDIOCY. But of course it’s what the people too lazy to learn to do their job properly can just copypasta like some twelve year old script kiddie.
I know, I know, you’ve got better things to do than listen to me quote myself.
Well, if you’re going to cherry-pick your own comments, and quote only the rational bits, yeah.
I’m talking about the “let’s go back to the glorious 1990s” remarks, like the “500K of pretty pictures” and “lightbox idiocy” rants. Guess what - people want “pretty pictures,” and they don’t want to have to open each image in a new tab, with no easy navigation and no captions.
My own feeble little photo album software effort uses Highslide JS, and it’s had over 100,000 downloads so far. I guess all those users are just “idiots” in your universe.
Would be nice if i could get rid of the qTip tooltip, because the tooltips styling can be easy made with just css (canvas, border radius, shadow) - but there is one problem i have. And thats the viewport. I wont to show it on the left side of my form inputs but if the user has just 1024px than without javascript the tips are not visible.
And not all javascript is bad for usability/accessibility. I to the tooltips on the form because it explains to the visitor what to put in the fields and the validation shows instantly whats wrong without the need of sending the form first.
Or take lightboxe’s: You can switch though the images just with the keyboard arrows and can close it with esc.
I do what i can to make everything faster and my sites give me 90-100 points on YSlow and Google Page Speed. I change every old stuff now from shadow png’s and 4 png’s for round borders because we don’t need it anymore for styling. I use image sprites and so on…
But sorry i’m not a javascript god and i can’t to some stuff without jQuery.
And days have just 24 hours and there is really a lot of stuff you need to learn by yourself. You spend more time with reading books and to torture google than building things. Javascript, MySql, Ajax, Apache, Debian (unix), picture editing, video editing, google maps api, html, css, php, browser caching, and then all the different frameworks like Drubal, Typo, EE, Wordpress, Magento, OSCommerce, phpbb, vBulletin, Joomla… endless story…
So far that’s pretty much the only reason I use jQuery for anything… I have to get something done within a deadline (or even just a reasonable amount of time) and my vanilla Javascript isn’t up to it.
Though I did manage a nice pile of jQuery-less spaghetti on a site recently. It works, but it’s like Frankenstein’s monster. However, if it breaks, at least I know how to fix it. And it degrades.
You say that like hate is a bad thing… I hate anti-Semites… I hate racists… I hate pedophiles… I hate sleaze-ball scam artists who dupe clients into paying money for sites “vomited up any old way” that interfere with users actually be able to use the site or will cost the client ten times more than it should in the long run, especially if shock the site actually ends up with real traffic – is that a bad thing?
Hate can be a powerful motivator and just as much a force for good as for evil. Usually the people who try to stamp out hateful speech are trying to do little more than control your mind and stamp out independent thought. Hence why most of your dirty hippy types *****ing about “thought police” don’t realize that they’ve fallen for it themselves. (see FSF zealots)
Conformity, status quo, and the wussy “If you can’t say anything nice” copout – filed right alongside Eisenhower’s “apathy that had its roots in comfort, blindness and wishful thinking.”
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
– George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
Hate is like any other emotion – fear, love, joy – it’s what you do with it that makes it good or bad. Fear of fire prevents you from getting burned, or can prevent you from taking action to save yourself and others. Love of your fellow man can lead to great acts of kindness or horrible acts of jealousy. Joy can be the greatest of emotions until pursuit of it consumes you. Hate of bad things can cause you to act against them for the betterment of others.
As a maniac spf lurker, I must say it’s one of the most interesting threads I’ve came across in a long time.
I’m Swiss. I’m a designer. As you can guess, types and grids are all I need in this world.
But… When I explain my point to clients, believe me, I always end up feeling like a failure (oh well, ok, I am). They want all that web 2.0 stuff. (I hadn’t written “web 2.0” in a long while. This “expression” is absolutely embarrassing). They want jQuery, and transitions (vendor-specific code used to scare me) and whatnot. They want so many things that used to get me depressed that I sometimes considered quitting this career. Even started using a .ie6 class on my <html> tag. Thanks html5boilerplate.
So I decided to embrace it all. I’m now into 320 and Up, and it doesn’t feel that bad in the end. It feels pragmatic. Very modern. Just had to swallow the four different sizes of apple icons a client asked me for.
Purists always starve, don’t they? Oh wait, do I see a guy on a horse coming at me?
However, if you live in the real world you will soon realize that while many of these things are important its always a give and take relationship. When your not building a small little site there are more important things to concern yourself with. For example, using something like Joomla or Drupal it would not be practical to rewrite all modules to use semantic mark-up, if possible at all for the more powerful modules. JQuery pretty much makes JavaScript what it should have been all along. Many people would rather wait an extra millisecond than see a bare bone web presence then one lacking all personality and the “coolness” factor. Bandwidth is cheap, unless your running a 56K modem… I mean give me a break. The reason why technology advances is so that we can do more in the first place without efficiency becoming an issue. Call it wasteful or whatever but really its progress. In regards to degradation Google has no problem dropping support for certain browsers and sites such as facebook are completely worthless without JavaScript, so while graceful degradation is important to an extent it can depend on situation and budget. The web like the world will never be ideal certain sacrifices are always necessary. Now, that isn’t to say deathshadow60 is providing incorrect information just ideal and ideal is never practical. Making sacrifices along the way to maintain certain best practices and goals while others may fall beyond is all part of the game.
… and Which is funny since only 1 through 3 are truly accurate. (#3, that’s 140k thank you very much)
See, #4 is just sour grapes from the people who either don’t understand what I’m saying, or just are too damned lazy to do the job properly. I’m against WASTEFUL poorly used implementations of those technologies, not the technologies themselves. Javascript enhancement isn’t a bad thing – javascript enhancement that gets in the way, takes forever to load, doesn’t gracefully degrade when scripting isn’t available or if the user doesn’t want it is… Images, pretty images – are not a bad thing, you can HAVE those… But you shouldn’t blow 300k of images to do 30k’s JOB. Especially when in many cases those 30k images look nearly identical and don’t lock you into crappy fixed width inaccessible layouts that break if anyone dares to use a non-standard font-size. I’m getting sick of seeing 150k images that are only 150k because photoshop wouldn’t know an optimized image from the hole in it’s DVD. I’m getting sick of seeing cryptic convoluted 60k javascripts relying on MULTIPLE 100K libraries to do what should only take 4-6k of javascript to actually accomplish!!! THAT’S WHAT I’m TALKING ABOUT!!!
Which is what #5 is all about – making the page USEFUL to visitors – PEOPLE. Coding it and building it so PEOPLE CAN USE IT. Making it and building it so that when it gets real traffic people can continue to use it and you don’t bankrupt the people paying to host it…
How the devil is that saying “people don’t matter”?!? Lands sake, graceful degradation is supposed to be there SO PEOPLE CAN {nastiest expletive in my vocabulary omitted} USE IT!!!
The people who basically say all the stuff I’m talking about doesn’t matter – those are the ones saying people don’t count, just their goofy gee ain’t it neat flashy bull that has no substance whatsoever and in most cases boils down to a gallon of shellac on a pile… No matter how much you shine it after that’s still a turd.
I think that’s what’s torquing me off the most about certain posters of late – they seem to think I’m saying flat text with no pretty images – I’m not saying you can’t have that; I’m saying don’t piss all over yourself and your work with inept piss poor site building techniques that result in half a megabyte or more sites that could be built nearly identical in a fifth that if you took the time to not just vomit up your sites any old way like it’s still 1997.
