this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
105 points (85.2% liked)
Programming
21048 readers
694 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yep.
On a rare occasion I hit a website that loads just like "boom" and it surprises me.
Why is that? Because now we are used to having to wait for javascript to load, decompress, parse, JIT, transmogrify, rejimble and perform two rinse cycles just to see the opening times for the supermarket.
(And that's after you dismissed the cookie, discount/offer and mailing list nags with obfuscated X buttons and all other manner of dark patterns to keep you engaged)
Sometimes I wish we'd just stopped at gopher :)
See also: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
EDIT: Yes, this is facetious.
Another continual irritation:
The widespread tendency for JavaScript developers to intercept built-in browser functionality and replace it with their own poor implementation, effectively breaking the user's browser while on that site.
And then there's the vastly increased privacy & security attack surface exposed by JavaScript.
It's so bad that I am now very selective about which sites are allowed to run scripts. With few exceptions, a site that fails to work without JavaScript (and can't be read in Firefox Reader View) gets quickly closed and forgotten.
Irony
Hahahahhah.
See also: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
And: https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
Both of which are vastly better.
See also: https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/
The key idea remains though. Text on a page, fast. No objections with (gasp) colours, if the author would like to add some.
I prefer the original. The "better" one had a bit of a lag (only a fraction of a second, but in this context that's important) loading and the "best" one has the same lag and unreadable colours.
The original is terrible. It works ok on a phone, but on a wide computer screen it takes up the full width, which is terrible for readability.
If you don't like the colours, the "Best" lets you toggle between light mode and dark mode, and toggle between lower and higher contrast. (i.e., between black on white, dark grey on light grey, light grey on dark grey, or white on black)
I exist btw
Although these websites are still doable.
The kind I absolutely loathe are the ones which, if I make the window width smaller (because the website is not using the space any way), the text in the website further reduces with exact proportion.
At that point, I consider if what I am reading is actually worth clicking the "Reader Mode" button or should I just
Ctrl+WOK, I was on my phone. Just checked on my desktop and agree the original could do with some margins. I stand behind the rest of what I said - the default colours for the "best" are awful - the black black and red red is really garish. If I didn't notice the dark/light mode switch and contrast adjustment does it really matter if they were there or not? There is also way to much information on the "best" one - if I'm going to a web site cold, with no expectation at all of what you might find, I'm not going to sit there and read that much text - I need a gentle introduction, that may lead somewhere.
I actually really like the black black. And they didn't use red red (assuming that term is supposed to mean FF0000); it's quite a dull red, which I find works quite well. I prefer the high contrast mode though, with white white on black black, rather than slightly lower-contrast light grey text. I'm told it's apparently evidence-based to use the lower-contrast version, but it doesn't appeal to me.
Though I will say I intensely dislike the use of underline styling on "WRONG". Underline, on the web, has universally come to be a signal of a hyperlink, and should almost never be used otherwise. It also uses some much nicer colours for both unclicked and visited hyperlinks.
I tend to use proper black on proper white too, specially on a laptop monitor of mine, that makes it look specially good.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder :-)
What's the difference between 1 and 2? And 3's colors hurt my eyes, and flimmers while scrolling (though, color weirdness may come from DarkReader)
"7 fucking [CSS] declarations" adjusting the margins, line height, font size, etc.
The most important difference between 1 and 2 is, IMO, the width limiter. You can actually read the source yourself, it's extremely simple hand-written HTML & (inline) CSS.
max-width:650px;stops you needing to crane your head. It also has slightly lower contrast, which I'm told is supposedly better for the eyes according to some studies, but personally I don't really like as much, which is why "Best" is my favourite, since it has a little button to toggle between light mode and dark mode, or between lower and maximum contrast.Having 2 loads gives the illusion that it's fast, aka. not waiting staring at something not doing anything for too long.
From a business perspective, isn't it best to just yeet most stuff to the front end to deal with?
My usual onlineshop got a redesign (sort of). Now, the site loads the header, then the account and cart icons blink a while and after a few seconds it loads the content.
Ah yes, and the old "flash some faded out rectangles" to prepare you for that sweet, sweet, information that's coming any.... moment..... now....
No, now....
Now...
Is "rejimble" a real word for a real thing?
Who's the genius who named it that?
I made it up, but if be happy for it to be adopted.
No, but it could be if we try hard enough!
This is whole sentence is facetious nonsense. Just-in-time compilation is not in websites, it's in browsers, and it was a massive performance gain for the web. Sending files gzipped over the wire has been going on forever and the decompressing on receival is nothing compared to the gains on load time. I'm going to ignore the made up words. If you don't know you don't know. Please don't confidently make shit up.
EDIT: I'm with about the nags though. Fuck them nags.