Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Anyone who knows me at least a little bit, knows that I like things to be optimal. So, it should come to you as no surprise that I attempted to view Facebook using a console based web-browser called Links.

Unfortunately for me and all those other console users out there, Facebook doesn’t share our enthusiasm for efficient software, and instead wants us all to use their website that’s bloated with javascript. Frankly, I don’t need pop-up menus for every single item on the screen. I don’t need textareas that resize themselves when they gain focus. I just don’t need all this bloat — and neither do you!

Later on, I decided to make a screenshot, so I started an xterm in X, and made this…well, I added the red box to highlight and interesting part.

This isn’t just Facebook, it’s almost everything on the web these days. Wordpress that I use for these rants, the “admin” interface is bloated, much less so than Facebook and other sites, but still far too much “crap” that doesn’t need to be there.

I think we have reached a point where we’re no longer strictly in the age of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 was about making websites look nice (nice being relative to the web designs of 1990s). I think it’s already web 2.1. It’s not about making websites look even nicer, it’s about making them oozing with bloated javascript.

Someone else who’s also syndicated on Planet LILUG posted two interesting posts. I am NOT saying this sarcastically. He points out the problems with web development. I don’t think he’s as “cynical” about it as I am, but he does see the problems.

Frankly, I don’t care if a website I’m visiting has “nice” combo boxes, or a “fancy” spinner. I want a website to display the content. I should also add that even HTML 3.2 has combo boxes. Sure, they weren’t all shiny, and the data wasn’t all auto-magically pulled from a SQL database over XMLRPC or somesuch nonsense. Those (HTML 3.2) combo boxes displayed choices. What’s the sole purpose of a combo box you ask? Well, believe it or not, it’s to display choices! If you really dislike the way HTML 3.2 looked, you could easily (and quite safely) try HTML 4.01 with some stylesheets. It loads fast, it looks nice, and it doesn’t eat 10-20% of the cpu when you do something as silly as type a lot of text into a textarea.

Don’t even get me started on FCKeditor and other bloatware like it. At one point, some software started embedding such editors into their code — Wikipedia did, Wordpress did, I’m sure others did as well. I disabled it in my Wordpress - it’s bloated enough as it is, I don’t need an additional 3+ second delay to display a page with a big text area to type text into. Wikipedia (or should I say MediaWiki?) tried to do the same thing. I remember disabling it, or doing something to get the old textarea back. I don’t know what they’ve done since then.

So, if you’re in the website biz, do everyone (including yourself) a favor, and  keep it simple.