• xmunk@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      60
      ·
      22 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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        42
        ·
        22 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
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          44
          ·
          22 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
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            22 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
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            21 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
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          21 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.

          • Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            21 days 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!

            • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              21 days 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@lemmynsfw.com
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          21 days 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.