How is this Website so fast!? (www.youtube.com)
from mesamunefire@lemmy.world to programming@programming.dev on 21 Oct 2024 16:26
https://lemmy.world/post/21109791

#programming

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burgersc12@mander.xyz on 21 Oct 2024 17:33 next collapse

TL:DW Magic

xmunk@sh.itjust.works on 21 Oct 2024 17:56 collapse

Nah, a lot of old tech. I used to work on shit like this… loading all your images (including the fucking rounded corners for IE) into a sprite… setting up caching, using prefetching and inlined CSS/JS for critical path stuff.

There was a whole industry around web performance in the days that a customer might be trying to download your site over their 256 kbps connection.

It’s neat tech and I miss fiddling with it. I honestly found it a lot more fulfilling than the SPA era of web design.

Jesus_666@lemmy.world on 21 Oct 2024 18:16 next collapse

Aw, c’mon! Who doesn’t enjoy piping ten megabytes of JavaScript through Webpack to achieve those crucial on-scroll effects on an otherwise static page?

xmunk@sh.itjust.works on 21 Oct 2024 18:48 collapse

Hey let’s not lie to ourselves… most of those megabytes of JS are there to disable the copy functionality for anyone browsing our site.

Why? … reasons. Someone in marketing said a thing once.

mesamunefire@lemmy.world on 21 Oct 2024 20:50 next collapse

I once had to add in custom tab behavior because a green screen used to work in a specific way in an ordering page. The IBM system that we replaced only had a couple of users but was responsible for something like 30-40% of all orders in a small company. So in it went! Fun times.

mindbleach@sh.itjust.works on 23 Oct 2024 03:33 collapse

Nothing has ever worked less than giving people text and getting mad when they have it. It was a joke on Geocities in the ninteteen goddamn hundreds, and yet people keep fuckin’ trying.

sjpwarren@programming.dev on 21 Oct 2024 21:43 next collapse

Come to the HTMX side…

xmunk@sh.itjust.works on 21 Oct 2024 22:06 next collapse

<Pig Latin instructions unclear, entire site rewritten in XHTML />

mesamunefire@lemmy.world on 22 Oct 2024 06:25 collapse

Such a nice library.

RustyShackleford@programming.dev on 22 Oct 2024 20:59 next collapse

Noob question: what is the SPA era of web design; when did it roughly start?

xmunk@sh.itjust.works on 22 Oct 2024 22:02 next collapse

By SPA I mean “single page application” it’s currently the dominant approach and powered in a large part by technologies like react and node. I’m not certain when it started precisely… with technology it’s more a case of “rising to prominence” rather than “first happened” I think it probably really started going around 2014 with HTML5?

SPAs are still pretty hot but they’ve waned in popularity due to overuse and general complexity. Essentially your website becomes a single page that just swaps out what’s shown to the user as they “navigate” between different parts of the site. When well done this can make a site incredibly responsive, but it’s often quite poorly done and responsiveness can end up blocked by server requests anyways.

Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com on 22 Oct 2024 22:20 collapse

Interestingly the pendulum is now swinging the other way. If you look at next.js for example, server generated multi page applications are back on the menu!

xmunk@sh.itjust.works on 22 Oct 2024 22:48 collapse

Yea, I don’t want to totally shit on SPAs but server-side rendering has a lot of advantages and is so much fucking simpler.

I’m a PHP dev and DB specialist in my day job - there are a lot of good server-side tech options.

Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com on 22 Oct 2024 22:19 collapse

I’d place it right around when angular started gaining traction. That’s when it became common to serve just one page and have all the navigation happen in JavaScript.

mindbleach@sh.itjust.works on 23 Oct 2024 03:38 collapse

See: The Website Obesity Crisis.

The author links their tweet saying “your website should not exceed in file size the major works of Russian literature.” At the time, that page on Twitter was 900 KB. Today it is 11 MB.

bitcrafter@programming.dev on 22 Oct 2024 18:43 next collapse

I disagree that the web site is fast; it took at least 10 seconds before the video would start playing.

zzx@lemmy.world on 22 Oct 2024 23:00 next collapse

McMaster Carr is the greatest site ever. I could browse forever

untorquer@lemmy.world on 23 Oct 2024 04:48 collapse

I use the site daily. Being able to download FREE CAD models in one click, nominal dimensions for nearly everything, and linked compatible components makes design so much simpler. I can swap a screw out in my assemblies in seconds. Other online hardware catalogs just don’t compare. It’s the perfect first draft resource.

If McMaster ever goes down it’s going to take twice as long to do any design.

Thcdenton@lemmy.world on 22 Oct 2024 23:38 collapse

Dooope