Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahartmetz | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but if your website with, you know, text and stuff, doesn't do any stupid and unnecessary crap, it doesn't matter where the nonexistent unnecessary yet expensive code doesn't run.

View on HN

and if you have no website at all, it takes zero seconds to load.

But for people who are developing websites that are more than just text, this is an excellently written article and great advice.

It's funny, for mobile app dev it feels like the community are a lot of focused on staying off the main thread, this is the first time I've come across one for webdev.

Well yeah but if you do actually need things like images, animations, high frequency updates, etc, this is actually a pretty good overview of how to approach it. Also learned that react uses posting to a MessageChannel to yield!

GP is right that just like with garbage where "reduce, reuse, recycle" is the mantra, the first question for optimizing something should be if you need to do the calculation at all.

This is true as well, yeah, but it came off as dismissive of everything too. Personally I prefer information dense interfaces with minimal chrome, but there really is a certain joy when you get to use a well designed and optimized fancy reactive, immersive interface

Since when do images need more than just an <img> tag and a bit of styling?

You'd be surprised how expensive it is to render text, although unless your page is very large you won't see it being slow on modern systems.

I'm more surprised how cheap it is in browsers because I know it's not that easy - they are really really good at it. Pure text rendering is therefore rarely an issue.

Amazing how you are being so down voted, most webpages do utter crap that no one would want the webpages to be doing other then advertisers. Really most things should be text and if we lived in a more cooperative world everything would be easy to parse and manipulate text with some video and images and perhaps various well defined interface types for different services that can be implemented in various ways as to the users liking.

Sure, but there are sites like HN and there are sites like https://earth.nullschool.net/

What's your point? Are you saying all animations and rendering are unnecessary?

My point is that many websites are using way too much technology for what they need to do, with correspondingly long load times and choppy runtime behavior.

Correct. But if the page is, at least in part, an art piece rather than an information dump, or needs to do interactive rendering for its purpose (an editor like the markdown example, live updating status displays, games and other interactive toys, etc), then the tech is necessary and this article is useful.

Which is something like less than one percent of websites, and this technology is deployed much, much more widely.

Again, correct. But “don't do this if you don't really need to do this” is rather pointless to say, hence is being downvoted, because people already being that sensible don't need to hear it, and those who are not are unlikely to listen. The comment is just noise, as unnecessary as the unnecessary animation and other gumf that it is railing against.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com