Jason Knight
2 min readApr 9, 2021

--

I don't know if I'd use the term "racist", but classist certainly does apply. Effete, elitist, classism.

And I've heard the same lame excuses time and time again for near on twenty years. EVEN THEN we heard the same excuses for many of the same things. AT BEST the names have changed.

Like the people who used to say "But everyone has flash installed" now say "everyone has JavaScript enabled". Tell that to the people in locked down workplaces, those who block JS intentionally with the noscript browser extension, or are in regions where bandwidth and/or hardware capabilities make it impractical. It's the same herp, just a different derp.

Same as the "but everyone has broadband now" idiocy; where people seem to forget not just is that a lie (Coos County NH much?) the term "broadband' is shockingly... broad. Lands sake here in Cheshire County NH I might have 40mbps cable at home, but on the road I'm lucky if I can get a 3g signal on my phone with data trickling at dialup speeds.

Much less, server throughput has NOT kept pace, the technical debt in terms of hosting this junk is getting ridiculous. I deal a lot with banks and public utilities, and time and time again I see these places burdening themselves down with thousands of dollars of dedicated hosting, offloading to the cloud, the added trickery and pain of stuff like varnish, where to be brutally frank given what their sites do, are for, and their traffic numbers there's no reason for them to need more than a $20/mo VPS and two to four people to maintain things.

And why? Because they layered together seven or eight frameworks. Because they're using two to ten times the code needed. Because most of their employees don't even know how any of the code they're working on actually works.

Again, 200k of markup, 500k of CSS, 2 megabytes or more of JavaScript spread out over dozens if not hundreds of files, with slow, broken "web application" rubbish pissing off users, And for what? Doing what a conventional website would do cleaner, faster, and with BETTER ux in 16k of markup, 48k of CSS, and little to no JavaScript in three or four files?

But sure, keep telling me how much "easier" or "better" this ignorant trash is.

--

--

Jason Knight
Jason Knight

Written by Jason Knight

Accessibility and Efficiency Consultant, Web Developer, Musician, and just general pain in the arse

Responses (1)