Just read this....place JS code before footer instead of in head tag

I actually agree with that. There is no “accessible” animation. If an animation is accessible, it’s accessible because it was accessible before the animation, and the animation just happens to not break it. Likewise, most decorative animations are more annoying then helpful.

I’m not as hard lined. There are a few animations that are fine (a 200ms sliding animation isn’t horrible). Some can even be good for user interaction (for example, a slide show which animates the slides as sliding lets the user know which direction they’re going). But they do add a lot of JS fluff that could otherwise be avoided. On a typical website, they’re usually like using a rocket launcher to go deer hunting… overkill.

Also, with the high performance stuff from YDN… I verified the effects more myself by tracking the data as we made changes. =p They’re all pretty good, and most are common sense.

You’ve already declared that two of the most popular websites in the world are garbage built by idiots (paraphrasing). You don’t seem to me to be rational on this topic, and I’m quite certain it won’t matter what website I put in front of you.

I agree with DS on this. I’ll readily admit that I’m a so-called Google Fanboy. I love the search, I love the browser, and I love the company. I don’t care about my privacy (read: I’m not paranoid) and I appreciate the cleanliness of the browser and the page. But some of the design stuff that they are doing (weird navigation, weird drop-down menu they experimented with, etc.) gets on my nerves.

And Yahoo! Oh gosh. I hate that website. I don’t think I’ve visited there in a year. Their layout is cluttered, there are ten bazillion things grabbing your attention, it takes a long time to load, it’s annoying, they have ads (ads! On a major website! Shoot me!), and it’s just a terrible site (in my own opinion).

~TehYoyo

Edit:

Nice. :smiley: Sadly, I went budget with AMD Phenom Quad and GTX 550Ti.

I actually agreed with DS that too much animation (or in this case, weird designs) is a bad thing. But the question is whether jQuery is to blame. DS seems to want to blame jQuery for everything that’s wrong on the Internet.

No. DS is blaming jQuery because it is too big, tends to be over-used, and is poorly used by developers.

~TehYoyo

Whether jQuery is over-used or poorly used should be criticism directed at developers. jQuery is not responsible for bad programmers writing bad code.

As for whether it’s too big… earlier in this thread, we actually measured jQuery’s impact. Only 13ms were spent downloading the library.

Does jQuery have a “checkbox selection utility” where the library size can be reduced to only use the required functionality?

The UI components do, but the core library does not.

Personally, I don’t think this would be an important offering, for two reasons. First, real-world sites tend to use every component of the library. And two, because it takes only 13ms to download the library, even if its size was cut in half, you’d save only 7ms.

No doubt jQuery at the moment has numerous functions which call other library functions.

I was thinking more of a learning tool where it could be useful to have an isolated function/block of functions that could be safely modified.

You could probably do that with the jQuery source files. https://github.com/jquery/jquery/tree/master/src

Surely, on your computer. But on mobile phones in remote areas, in (as DS mentioned) the countryside, or in remote areas where they don’t have high-quality, fast wifi, that’s not so. Since the web is about accessibility for all, we need to cater to these different people.

~TehYoyo

Many thanks, the contents of the link appear to solve my problem. It is now on my daily increasing Todo List.

No, that’s stuffing words in my mouth – I’m saying that jQuery is one of the many factors in recent development that’s contributing to the decline. There are lots of rubbish sites built without jQuery; I’ve just never seen one built with it that was worth a flying purple fish or at the very least wouldn’t be a dozen times more useful without it. It seems to exist to actively encourage people to write sloppy scripts, add scripted nonsense to websites that shouldn’t even be on said pages in the first place, and contribute to this trend of telling people in places like the Dakota’s, Oregon, Northern NH and western ME to basically go perform anatomically impossible acts upon themselves.

Which you can see in half the “help me with my broken page” threads that fill up areas like the HTML and CSS help sections on forums like this one…

which would be BS when I’m tethered at 128kbps… since by definition 30k would be 2.3 seconds; would be BS when I’m at my neighbors house at 768kbs shared with four people, since then it would be anywhere from half a second to as much as 4 seconds… probably bull when at Panera bread sharing a 1.5mbps connection with 15 other people.

… and that’s not counting the 150 to 500ms of real world handshaking for the extra file.

13ms… right, MAYBE if you were hosted in chicagoland, on the same side of the backbone as the server, and the client is on a 3mbps connect. Well, let’s do the math.

13ms for 30k at 8 data bits and one stop bit works out to 2.596 mbps… just for the data transfer. Shame that in the states more than half the online population is below 1.5mbps, most mobile plans never hit that speed, in Australia many people are neutered down to 128kbps or slower the moment they use more than 5 gigs throughput a month, and of course our friends in canada who are facing metered connections and overage charges who I’m SO sure are happy with that extra 30k that’s typically for nothing more than a goofy animation or redundant checks that have to be re-done server side anyways.

JQUIP.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/11/jquip-puts-jquery-on-a-diet.php

But on mobile phones in remote areas…

(not directed at TehYoyo but using the quote to bring up the topic)
Good lord, don’t send a Javascript library to a mobile phone. I don’t care if it’s powered with a futuristic CPU ready to do calculations for CERN and NASA… those things still run on batteries and batteries are still little more than less-stinky Leyden Jars.

You can build with minor (or no) JS for mobile (since you’re doing that anyway, right?) and if you feel your site must have craploads of scripts then at least use an isMedia() or a matchMedia to check that the screen is large (still no guarantee that large screens don’t have crappy internets or not sitting on a battery, but at least the battery is likely to be larger and the CPU more likely to be more powerful) before loading big libraries.

Only 13ms were spent downloading the library.

I think before a library makes a claim on how fast they load, they should be required to do the test in a small town with lots of trees (yeah people use satellite for internets), and not in a big city with fiber optic connections. That way, your numbers can only be better for those folks.
I think I usually have a pretty good connection, but I still get sites loading slowly sometimes. Who knows what the cause is? The big pipe in Groningen coming in from the UK getting bogged down? The switching center in Rotterdam having some issues? My ISP having a retard moment? My router getting a blast from the neighbour’s 40mhz appliance (we haven’t figured out what it is yet)?

I’ve not heard of jQuip before. I think I’ll look into it. It’s true that jQuery has been bulking up a bit since it’s initial releases. It’d be nice to see a modular approach. I’ve noticed that outside of the selectors, I use only a very very small portion of the jQuery library. I’d wager I use less than 10KB of it (uncompressed).

13ms is a really small number, and probably unrealistic for most people. I’m smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley and I can get those speeds, even on my phone. But even still, it’s sometimes spotty (we have really good 4G in some places, but go walk a couple of blocks and you’re lucky to have net at all). I know that not everyone has those kinds of speeds. They are improving, but we aren’t there yet. Using “well it’s fast” as an excuse for not keeping sites as small as responsibly possible is a weak excuse.

(That said, I am still a big fan of jQuery and I think it’s actually a space saver in many necessarily JS-heavy projects.)

Exactly. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I think what we’re all saying is that jQuery should be used effectively and sparingly, and always with good cause.

~TehYoyo

Some unrealistic thoughts in this thread, as far as jQuery is regarded.

About resource demand
Mobile use number one is media. As in movie clips, music, games. I think it’s safe to say jQuery is far less demanding and it’s better suited for mobile then those. For reluctant spirits, there are efforts to cater the mobile even further: http://jquerymobile.com/.

About download size
jQuery, as file size, is no bigger than a regular small image. There is no real gain in restraining this download.

About bandwidth
There are repositories, like Google’s, that make caching jQuery a viable solution across the globe. Download once from a site and you’re good to go for thousands more.

It’s in the hands of the developers, and in the minds of the potential adopters. It has nothing to do with ISPs, mobile devices, cables, malware (BTW Mallory, you should check for that). jQuery exists, it is used extensively, and it doesn’t hurt anyone when used, human or electrical device. Unless you get a headache from a stubborn piece of code and you smash the device apart.

DISCLAIMER No user will be hurt during your use of jQuery.

PS There are those claiming jQuery is overkill: “I can make what you want w/o jQuery and in 2.6 lines of code”. Who cares? Who needs your Norton Commander clone for DOS anymore? Everybody else is using Total Commander, xplorer2 and such. Efficient and productive code will always be codependent. It’s not about reinventing the wheel each time you want to go for a ride.

That’s an absolute statement and highly inadvisable to use at any point in your life.

I could hurt a user with my use of jQuery. What if I went jQuery crazy and started animating everything so that each word was actually an image in a slideshow? That would kill accessibility and usability.

~TehYoyo

jQuery is a tool just like HTML, CSS or plain JavaScript. Everything can be misused. Blaming worthless animation on jQuery is like bashing someones face with a hammer and blaming it all on the hammer. That is how ridiculous and misinformed that statement is!