Front-End Developer Decries 'Garbage' Design Choices on 'The Bullshit Web'

"Ever wondered why pages seem to load slower and slower? Or why it is that browsing seems to take just as long to load a page, even though your broadband connection doubled in speed a couple of months ago?" gb7djk, a long-time Slashdot reader, blames "the bullshit web" -- as described in this essay by Calgary-based front-end developer Nick Heer (who does his testing on a 50 Mbps connection).
A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web... When I use the word "bullshit" in this article, it isn't in a profane sense. It is much closer to Harry Frankfurt's definition in On Bullshit: "It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth -- this indifference to how things really are -- that I regard as of the essence of bullshit...." The average internet connection in the United States is about six times as fast as it was just ten years ago, but instead of making it faster to browse the same types of websites, we're simply occupying that extra bandwidth with more stuff. Some of this stuff is amazing.... But a lot of the stuff we're seeing is a pile-up of garbage on seemingly every major website that does nothing to make visitors happier -- if anything, much of this stuff is deeply irritating and morally indefensible.
Take that CNN article, for example. Here's what it contained when I loaded it:
- Eleven web fonts, totalling 414 KB
- Four stylesheets, totalling 315 KB
- Twenty frames
- Twenty-nine XML HTTP requests, totalling about 500 KB
- Approximately one hundred scripts, totalling several megabytes -- though it's hard to pin down the number and actual size because some of the scripts are "beacons" that load after the page is technically finished downloading.
The vast majority of these resources are not directly related to the information on the page, and I'm including advertising... In addition, pretty much any CNN article page includes an autoplaying video... Also, have you noticed just how many websites desperately want you to sign up for their newsletter?
The essay also deals harshly with AMP, "a collection of standard HTML elements and AMP-specific elements on a special ostensibly-lightweight page that needs an 80 kilobyte JavaScript file to load correctly....required by the AMP spec to be hotlinked from cdn.amp-project.org, which is a Google-owned domain. That makes an AMP website dependent on Google to display its basic markup, which is super weird for a platform as open as the web."
It argues AMP is only speedier "because AMP restricts the kinds of elements that can be used on a page and severely limits the scripts that can be used," calling it a pseudo-solution. "Better choices should be made by web developers to not ship this bullshit in the first place.... An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user's computer are used in a page's visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page."