• @[email protected]
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    631 month 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.

    • @[email protected]
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      451 month 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?

      • @[email protected]
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        461 month 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.

        • mesamuneOP
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          81 month 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          230 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.

    • Rusty Shackleford
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      21 days ago

      Noob question: what is the SPA era of web design; when did it roughly start?

      • @[email protected]
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        121 month 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.

        • Zos_Kia
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          41 month ago

          Interestingly the pendulum is now swinging the other way. If you look at next.js for example, server generated multi page applications are back on the menu!

          • @[email protected]
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            41 month ago

            Yea, I don’t want to totally shit on SPAs but server-side rendering has a lot of advantages and is so much fucking simpler.

            I’m a PHP dev and DB specialist in my day job - there are a lot of good server-side tech options.

      • Zos_Kia
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        51 month ago

        I’d place it right around when angular started gaining traction. That’s when it became common to serve just one page and have all the navigation happen in JavaScript.