Comment by beej71
2 years ago
It's not just web pages. It's easier to build bloated things in less time than non-bloated things. For-profit companies (rightly, I'd argue) don't value the Craft as much as the Bottom Line.
My home page, though admitted sparse and functional, is a total 39 KB download, including 9 link icons and a blurred full background image. (Turns out blurring the image allows you some incredible levels of JPEG compression with few artifacts.) I worked a bit to get it there. And that's nothing compared with what some demoscene folks can do. :)
The other day in one of my "get off my lawn" moments, I declared to the Rails app I was messing with that, "Every web framework sucks!" And then quickly amended the sentiment to include every test framework and build framework, for good measure.
I mean, they have their place for rapid development, of course. But the accompanying bloat and dependency surface hurts my soul.
What’s your homepage URL, tho? (You don’t give it, and can’t find it on your HN profile.)
FTR, here is a complete Solitaire game in ~30 kB over-the-wire: https://FreeSolitaire.win/
Last time I checked, an update for Microsoft Solitaire was 30 megabytes…
https://beej.us/ But, like I said, not super impressive.
I still maintain though if folks spent the time on it, they could get same the effect they were looking for with 10% the bandwidth.
Microsoft used to deliver Solitaire as a little toy for computers that had 20Mb harddisks.