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A comment on 'Oumuamua could be a shard from a dead planet. Parent comment

Re:'Oumuamua could be a shard from a dead planet by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @03:53AM (#22863616)
It does, technically speaking, and if it's the whole article I don't think fair use applies, BUT the website is protected by the DMCA so the onus is on Nat Geo to issue a takedown request. Second, legality aside, it's morally unjustifiable to have so much cruft and trackers on a webpage. I mean it's loading 1 MB of Javascript for what looks like a fairly straightforward, static website. Even if it's loaded async / after the main content, it's still an unreasonable amount for a website like this; if anything they should use a proper bundler so it only loads what is necessary.

(I've had great results for a site like this using Gatsby + Netlify)

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Re:'Oumuamua could be a shard from a dead planet by capableweb on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @09:01AM (#22865326)
> morally unjustifiable to have so much cruft and trackers on a webpage

I think the way to think about this is to compare it to magazines. While you can say that it's morally unjustifiable that magazines has ads and filler pages because it'll use more paper and we need to use less paper, the argument on the other side is that the business has to survive too so ads and trackers makes that more likely (from their perspective, I don't necessarily agree with that)

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Re:'Oumuamua could be a shard from a dead planet by zaroth on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @08:19AM (#22864964)
What if it doesn’t cache the page on the server, and the service is essentially a cloud-based user agent?

It can’t be legal to run a user-agent in your computer, and illegal to run a user agent in the cloud. The question becomes, what is the defining property of a user agent?

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