Explain this meme

Explain this meme

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>webdev here
The web programming is pretty shit today because we dont use it as it was designed to. It's all a bunch of patches and hacks that we put together to get the results we want. The whole system should be redesigned, will webassembly change that ? idk.

Just as assembly languages translate more or less directly into the platform's instruction set, web assembly directly translates to the core units of the Internet, and will incorporate common basic, albeit abstracted commands such as 'shitpost,' 'insert meme,' and 'serve ads.'

ECMAscript was designed to add small bits of interactivity to a website. It's turned into much more than that and it's starting to buckle under the demand for large scale web applications.

what you folks need to realize is that >90% of the things you use JS for should either not be there at all, or should be static content

>everything is a meme

kys

Your life is a meme

For example?

>stuff you shouldn't be doing at all
anything that uBlock stops in its default config. Advertising, analytics, etc.
Most comments sections
Spawning pop-ups. A lot of institutional websites still do this, fail, and then badger you to allow pop-ups. A family member's *bank* does this. This is just fucking lazy.

>stuff that should be static content
Images. Turn off or block JS and go to any image on flickr. Note how the image does not load. There's no reason for that.
Links and site navigation. We have hyperlinks, no reason to have an animated JS menu widget.
Basically any page where the content is just images and text - which is the majority of most websites - should need no client-side code running.

?

So you manually refresh the page to load new posts in a Sup Forums thread?
You open an entire new page just to post a reply instead of using the quick reply field?

Sup Forums worked perfectly well back before there was an extension and a little quick reply box. you just hit f5 to refresh.

Why would I do that when Javascript can load new posts much faster and using less resources?

>Advertising, analytics
Who are you to demand how websites make profit?

>Most comments sections
Very subjective opinion, why are you here if you don't like human interaction on the web?

>Turn off or block JS and go to any image on flickr. Note how the image does not load.

Unless you want incredibly slow and annoying websites you'd need JS with frameworks like React to handle DOM manipulation and injection. Sites like Flickr, Twitter, DeviantArt, or any site that updates content without the need of a refresh simply would not work back in the 90s.

>anything that uBlock stops in its default config. Advertising, analytics, etc.
Basically what you are saying is that every company suddenly stop their most profitable use of internet space just because...?

>Spawning pop-ups.
Popups are useful in certain cases. There's nothing wrong in a *bank* spawning popups (as long as it's not ads), nothing unclassy.

>Images
Sometimes they can do image optimization on the fly (ultra-rare), sometimes they serve them dynamically to avoid hotlink or being able to save the image.

> no reason to have an animated JS menu widget
It's called UX (User Experience). There's a whole field about it. A site is not only about the information presented but also the interaction.

>Turn off or block JS
Literally, nowadays, the only people without js are >muh botnet tinfoil hats and search engine crawlers.


By what you're saying I have no doubts that you're a c programmer and uses arch.

Because Javascript was created by a Jew. All Stormfront users have it disabled.

>Sites like Flickr, Twitter, DeviantArt, or any site that updates content without the need of a refresh simply would not work back in the 90s.
Why the hell do you need to update content at all on a site like Flickr or DA, with or without a manual refresh? Are people really sitting around on image-hosting sites staring at an open tab waiting for a (You)? I doubt it. The purpose of the page is to display an image. You can do that with one HTML tag, instead of a whole fucking JS interpreter. When a user loads a page, serve it. There. Job done. You don't need to do anything fancier, you've fulfilled your mission.

>yes let's just waste resources for no reason because muh static pages

There is still no need for it, my cc website will load up the semester class list on their assignment and quiz area using ajax for 3 to 4 lines of text, and id urls.

>he doesn't understand the powers of html5

You seem to think JS consumes more resources than it should but that isn't the case at all.

>Popups are useful in certain cases. There's nothing wrong in a *bank* spawning popups (as long as it's not ads), nothing unclassy.
Pop-up blocking has been standard issue in browsers for a decade, and lots of web users were doing it with outboard applications and extensions for many years before that. Anyone building a webpage should expect that visitors browsers will be blocking popups, and should build a site that works regardless.

>It's called UX (User Experience). There's a whole field about it. A site is not only about the information presented but also the interaction.
So why make it more complicated than it needs to be? I thought simplicity was good. Everyone who can find the on button on a computer understands links. I realize it makes you feel super-cool when you think up the idea of stuffing everything into an animated little widget, giving it an abstract icon, and calling it a "hamburger menu". But really most design these days is design for design's sake, not for the sake of a consistent and straightforward UI.

>Basically what you are saying is that every company suddenly stop their most profitable use of internet space just because...?
Same reason a factory shouldn't dump their waste in the river, even if it's legal and profitable. Don't lie to yourself, ads, no matter how targeted, are not adding value for users. They are inherently exploitative of users.

Enjoy unemployment.

People want ajax dynamic loading without refreshing.

People want shit done fast so you don't have time to fix the database someone before you fucked up so you do little javascript tricks to make the page act like it's loading faster.

CSS3 fixed a lot of the stupid shit people used js for but like it or not dynamic 'reactive' pages are here to stay as awful as they are.

You just can't use the web in 2016 with JS turned off.


People hate on javascript programmers but it's pretty fun if you accept it's like building a house with duck tape because you need it done fast.

Took me a long time to figure out that what I thought was 'wrong' was actually the correct and accepted way.

They even have the spinning wheel and everything.

>People want shit done fast
and then they don't get it because they're using a phone with a dinky little processor, and your site is pulling down and running 10MB of JS.

>People hate on javascript programmers but it's pretty fun if you accept it's like building a house with duck tape because you need it done fast.
Building the house with duct tape is what the JS people are doing. They have a tool that can do many things. So they want to use it everywhere, for everything, without considering that there are a lot of places where they don't need that thing done at all, or where there's a better way of doing it if they do.

The hamburger menu was made to take less space on mobiles. Imagine a menu with 10 links, each needs to be big enough on mobile for fingers, that shit would take the entire screen space.

>Don't lie to yourself, ads, no matter how targeted, are not adding value for users. They are inherently exploitative of users.

So you'd rather have a system in place where you need to pay a website before visiting it? Otherwise I don't see how else they would stay afloat. Servers and hosting don't grow on trees.

>It's called UX (User Experience). There's a whole field about it. A site is not only about the information presented but also the interaction.

Whenever I have to use a plain html website for more than a few minutes I'm reminded of how straightforward web browsing can be and it's blissful. I appreciate that JS and the like can improve the user experience in a lot of cases, but superfluous things like animated menus for the sake of them have damaged the browsing experience

>>So you'd rather have a system in place where you need to pay a website before visiting it?
Yes, actually, more sites moving to a subscription model would do the web some good. Either they'd get their revenue without needing to invade the privacy of users, or they'd cease to exist. It'd make clickbait unprofitable and incentivize actual quality content.

and if you're just an individual who wants a blog or a personal website - the best part of the web, really - then your hosting costs are small enough that it's well within hobby-project budgets anyway.

>without considering that there are a lot of places where they don't need that thing done at all, or where there's a better way of doing it if they do.

Try making a twitter clone without JS. Let's see how you do.

almost everything done in twitter can be accomplished in 100% server side code

>Pop-up blocking has been standard issue in ...
I said in certain cases...
Every site more or less has at least one popup. The log in with facebook button for example.

>So why make it more complicated than it needs to be?
>, not for the sake of a consistent and straightforward UI.
Yes it is. The google's material ui is utter shit but it accomplishes its only one mission: accessibility and usability.
The way the amazon site is designed for example, wasn't fruit of: "This looks nice, that's it then". There's a whole psychological aspect behind it. The position, color, alignment and effect of the elements all matter.
Without javascript that would never be possible, or would take a lot of money, time and bugs by dealing with css when possible.
Internet only grew substantially because it became user friendly. Apple is only successful because it was user friendly.
Twitter would never had succeeded if it was laid out like Sup Forums.

>They are inherently exploitative of users.
No, they're not.
People are consumerists and also curious beings. Ads give them suggestions of what should be interesting for them. I would never had found Sup Forums if it wasn't for an ad at encyclopedia dramatica.
Advertising may be rigged but I praise it because I wouldn't be able to search for everything I'm looking for. Time is scarce and ads make it for better use than browsing endlessly for something can be presented to me based on what I'm seeing recently or reading (as in newspaper ads).

isnt twitter effectively a more limited blog page or RSSfeed?

Read his post before you repeat yourself.

It's better to have 10mb downloaded in the first time than 5mb downloaded on each request. Subsequent requests will only be served jsons with the changes.

Everything can actually, that doesn't mean users will stick around in a website that only uses HTML for the front end. But go ahead let's see you prove how user experience and "fancy animations" are completely useless.

Only thing that's difficult without active content is having the page change itself without the user asking the server "Hey, anything changed?" just make it a local application instead of a webpage if that's mandatory, like a bunch of messaging apps are already doing. If it isn't, all you have to do is assemble some text for the user when they check messages, or having the server accept a POST when they write one.

>webassembly
>garbage collection
Just what we needed, another excuse for lazy programmers to be lazy.

Thing is without the JS you cut it down a lot more than that. A page of text is a few KB, and caching can take care of much of that. It's better to send a 10KB page 100 times than a 10MB page once.

>just download a separate binary program with unrestricted access to local resources for every site you want to go to!

Yeah, but then they would have to at least quadruplicate their processing power now that they're going to have to render all server side.

Plus mobile users would use more date to use the site, leading to higher phone charges, leading to a drop in user base.

Most sites don't need to refresh themselves, or send anything more complicated than you can put in a POST. You think they do, but they don't.

JS doesn't take that much space. Not even most frameworks are that big.

You're wasting more resources on your part and on their server by refreshing entire pages instead of just updating chunks of it.

Sure, they don't need to, but 99.999% of users will prefer that experience than manually pressing F5 repeatedly.

Have you ever used Office Online?
Explain to me how that would be possible without html.

JS*

>and then they don't get it because they're using a phone with a dinky little processor, and your site is pulling down and running 10MB of JS.

But it's delivered - it's something that works. That's the point. Most of the time if you did something the 'right' way it would take at minimum twice the amount of time.

This is how technical debt is created, you build hacks on hacks just to keep your head above water.

> Building the house with duct tape is what the JS people are doing. They have a tool that can do many things. So they want to use it everywhere, for everything, without considering that there are a lot of places where they don't need that thing done at all, or where there's a better way of doing it if they do.

So yeah, lot of JS people think it's the only way. They are wrong. Most of the time however the right way takes much longer.

Not many companies understand this.

>>JS doesn't take that much space. Not even most frameworks are that big.
idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

>Let me close with a lovely TechTimes article warning that Google is going to start labeling huge pages with a special ‘slow’ mark in its mobile search interface.
>The article somehow contrives to be 18 megabytes long, including (in the page view I measured) a 3 megabyte video for K-Y jelly, an "intimate lubricant".
>It takes a lot of intimate lubricant to surf the unfiltered Web these days.

All that for actual content that's about a kilobyte worth of text.

>You're wasting more resources on your part and on their server by refreshing entire pages instead of just updating chunks of it.
when the entire page is a few tens of kilobytes - and the lions share of that is images that clients can trivially cache - you can handle lots of refreshes before you lose out on total data transfer.

that falls into the "you shouldn't be doing it" category. We had word processors and spreadsheets long before the web was a thing. And they ran on 486s.

Checked the website and it is now a 1.9MB page, with over 1.2MB spent on images, how is JS the culprit here?

>People want ajax dynamic loading without refreshing.
You mean, product managers want. End users prefer a site that Just Works and doesn't change its UI every two weeks and doesn't take fucking seconds to load.

>that falls into the "you shouldn't be doing it" category. We had word processors and spreadsheets long before the web was a thing. And they ran on 486s.

yeah... but they didn't run on literally every machine. Linux,Windows,OSX,BSD,Android,IOS everything that has a web browser with a reasonably new js engine.

I mean I agree this shit shouldn't be on the web, but I get why and there are some advantages to it.

>You mean, product managers want. End users prefer a site that Just Works and doesn't change its UI every two weeks and doesn't take fucking seconds to load.

The only person I care about is the person paying me. It's sad but true.

No I too prefer automatic updating on sites like with heavy flow of information by the minute like Twitter. Even Sup Forums now has the option for automatic updates without need of refreshing, don't tell me you don't use it.

If you don't care about how it should be done, and only care about what the guy who gives you your paycheck wants, why are you even here posting an opinion? You, by your own admission, don't give a shit.

>Cross-platform
I don't have to compile for each architecture, sometimes the same codebase is even shared among mobile and desktop users.
Less development = $$$

>Speed
If I want something, I want something fast. With javascript we now have many ways to present partial content before the rest gets loaded, and when I want to see more I don't need to refresh and lose more time, because while I was reading that article, other was loaded and appended right next to it (see Forbes)
More time in page = $$$

>Development cycle
Nowadays it's a breeze to develop websites using Javascript. You have so many frameworks, so many tools.
This is good because there's a division of front end and back end. In the past everything was mingled together so the internet was shit (look at archive.org).
With this division we have specialized people who most of the times only see the json response and formulate on this.
More control = $$$

>Space
Suppose js didn't exist. Each page you access is cached in plain html. The server would have to serve this, say, 400kb file for each and every user every single time they access the site.
Now you access other page, that one, also with 400kb. The server would have to serve this file for each and every user every single time they access the site.
And on...
In a matter of weeks your temp folder would be filling up your hd, the whole internet would become a deadlock, etc.
With js most of the times, the user receives the initial html, 100kb, the initial libs (which most of the times are already cached due to being hosted on a cdn), the js views and the data. A total of 5Mb for example.
When you go to another page you already have the html, the libs and the views cached, so you only receive a json.
Sometimes a little widget, like the reply box on the top of Sup Forums needs to be replicated on every page. There's no need to render every single one of them with it if you can just send the js view to the user and his browser takes care of the rest.

What do you mean "a site that works"?
A site that works is a dead document, I don't want this.

I'd rather have the ui changed by the day just so it can improve its usability and feel than have craigslist-style The Guardian.
I'd rather have it take 10 seconds to load the first time and instantly the others than have it take 3 seconds every time to load content-ridden espn.

>Work on the stock market
>Rely on fast, reliable market statistics on the fly
>Some guy on Sup Forums says persistent updating is not necessary and that everyone should be refreshing entire pages manually
>Shit he's right
>I now have middle finger glued to the F5 key
>I also block JS all together
>Can't see any dynamic charts made on that language anymore but that's okay

Thanks guys, I didn't realize how amazing pushing a button for thousands of times every day was so much fun! Truly, User Experience is a meme and not necessary at all.

What's hard to understand? It's basically replacing JS with bytecode that would allow any programming/scripting language to compile into a working browser app. Once it goes live, the "browser" will be the preferred platform for pretty much all consumer applications.