• xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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    23 days ago

    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
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      23 days ago

      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
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        23 days ago

        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.

        • mesamune@lemmy.worldOP
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          23 days ago

          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
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          22 days ago

          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.

      • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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        22 days ago

        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.