The Fucking Web

DISCLAIMER I do not mean to comment on the mentioned blog posts themselves: I use them as examples and rant the presentation format - a ill-minded modern web frontend.

Chapter I

This nice blog post on medium.com takes more than 100 HTTP requests to load. It takes 5.65 MiB storage and 40 MiB memory, only to serve you 900 words of plaintext. For good measure, 5.65 MiB is almost twice ¹ of the War and Peace.

screenshot showing http requests to load a blog page

Yeah, they cry so hard “we are not living in the 90s, it takes less than a second to load the page”. I mean, there are so many amazing things people do in the frontend, but the example shown here is NOT one of them.

Seriously, when I write a tech blog, my biggest pleasure is that the readers could take a few things away. I don’t want to hear

OMG! 🚀💥 This blog just blew my mind! 🤯🔥 Seriously, I’m shook! 😱💻Innovation at its finest! 🌟💡 Can’t wait to see what’s next! 🙌🏼💫#foss #linux 🤩👏 ²

And the medium platform (and many others) feel exactly like this.

STRONG OPINIONS:

if your site is not readable at all without javascript and css, then you (or your frontend dev) have failed. (Surprisingly the said medium blog works pretty well in w3m)

War and Peace in txt format is 3.1MiB. ↩︎
This text is generated by ChatGPT, anyways you get what I mean. ↩︎

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