The New York Times's Homepage isn't just text though. I see a lot of large, high-quality images, many of which transition to other images so you can see multiple visuals for a story. There's a "live updates" sidebar and a real-time stock ticker. There are video and audio embeds.

> Everyone else being bloated isn't an excuse.

It's not, but I'd rather focus on the worst offenders instead of the half-decent ones. I didn't compare it to Slack because I thought Slack was a good example—I did it for the exact opposite reason.

And, as long as there are sites that are so much heavier and yet seem to be doing fine (I don't like it, but it is what it is), I doubt NY Times is removing 3rd-party ads due to performance issues. It could be a nice side effect, though.

For comparison, I disabled ublock origin and privacy badger and loaded https://fivethirtyeight.com which is in the same realm - heavy text content with several interactive widgets, video and audio embeds.

Render time for my (aging) macbook pro is within the acceptable threshold (< 1500ms), memory snapshot in firefox is ~90Mb, and it feels like it loads quickly and responsively. It could be better - but it's infinitely more usable than NYT for me.

I don't think 1.5sec render time is acceptable for a webpage whose main payload of interest is 2-5kb of text (the article).

There's no articles on the page linked, and all the graphs on the right are dynamically rendered

Optimisation opportunities: if you have a dynamically generated image, and you haven't yet received user input, statically generate it.

NYT is not app but website (IMO) but Slack is app. Not good comparison target.

Websites are apps, apps are websites. The area between each is a gradient, not black and white. The best way to measure this is to check a couple of metrics.

Does this resource need to be generated dynamically?

Related: can this resource be cached?

More important: can this resource be resized?

Often overlooked: do I need to process this javascript to provide the equivalent UX?

The modern Web is terrible, and the modern state of app dev is terrible due to a substantial subset of the reasons that the modern Web is terrible.

> Slack hasn't been a contender for "well made" in quite a few months.

It was a contender?

> NYT should be a relatively simple website.

There's editors from the NYT lurking here who will strongly disagree.

Once upon a time, Slack was actually really solid and I happily used it. It.. was quite some time ago.

And sure, obviously NYT is more complex than throwing textfiles at users.. but do you really need to be running A/B tests for acquisition and have such a complicated pipeline to buying a subscription? Do you need dozens of analytics suites? Data is useful, but only to an upper bound of what you can meaningfully analyze.

I don't disagree with you AND I've already been chastised once in the last week by a NYT staff member for daring to challenge their assertion that the web should be and overly complicated mess.

Cutting through institutional pressures is not easy, especially when those pressures are well entrenched. I recently had to rid our SEO department of a religious belief that everything in creation must be server-side rendered or it couldn't be indexed and the phrase "holy war" applies.

So, I have some empathy for the NYT staff as individual contributors, but as an org, it's time to evolve.

.

Are you working for booking.com?

"It's text, just send the damn text."

They only send what the user requests.

Using a software program that makes automatic requests that you are not easily in control of, e.g., a popular web browser, might give the impression that they control what is sent.

They do not control what is sent. The user does.^1

The user makes a request and they send a response.

One of the requests a fully-automatic web browser makes to NYT is to static01.nyt.com

Personally, as a user who prefers text-only, this is the only request I need to make. As such I don't really need a heavily marketed, fully-automatic, graphical, ad-blocking web browser to make a single request for some text.^2

    #! /bin/sh

    case $1 in
    world        |w*)  x=world       # shortcut: w
    ;;us         |u*)  x=us          # shortcut: u
    ;;politics   |p*)  x=politics    # shortcut: p
    ;;nyregion   |n*)  x=nyregion    # shortcut: n
    ;;business   |bu*) x=business    # shortcut: bu
    ;;opinion    |o*)  x=opinion     # shortcut: o
    ;;technology |te*) x=technology  # shortcut: te
    ;;science    |sc*) x=science     # shortcut: sc
    ;;health     |h*)  x=health      # shortcut: h
    ;;sports     |sp*) x=sports      # shortcut: sp
    ;;arts       |a*)  x=arts        # shortcut: a
    ;;books      |bo*) x=books       # shortcut: bo
    ;;style      |st*) x=style       # shortcut: st
    ;;food       |f*)  x=food        # shortcut: f
    ;;travel     |tr*) x=travel      # shortcut: tr
    ;;magazine   |m*)  x=magazine    # shortcut: m
    ;;t-magazine |t-*) x=t-magazine  # shortcut: t-
    ;;realestate |r*)  x=realestate  # shortcut: r
    ;;*)
    echo usage: $0 section
    exec sed -n '/x=/!d;s/.*x=//;/sed/!p' $0
    esac

    curl -s https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$x/index.jsonp

   Example: Make simple page of titles, article urls and captions, where above script is named "nyt".

    nyt tr |  sed '/\"headline\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/\".*/<\/p>/;p};/\"full\": \"/{s//<p>/;s/..$/<\/p>/;p};/\"link\": \"/{s///;s/ *//;s/\".*//;s|.*|<a href=&>&</a>|;p}' > travel.html

    firefox ./travel.html

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22125882

The truth is that they are just sending the damn text. However you are voluntarily choosing to use a software program that is automatically making requests for things other than the text of the article, i.e., "cruft".

1. The Google-sponsored HTTP/[23] protocol is seeking to change this dynamic, so if websites sending stuff to you without you requesting it first bothers you, you might want to think about how online advertisers and the companies that enable them might use these new protocols.

2. However I might use one for for viewing images, watching video, reading PDFs, etc., offline. Web browsers are useful programs for consuming media. It is in the simple task of making HTTP requests that their utility has diminished over time. The user is not really in control.

I'm just as upset by bloat and tracking as well but the criticism seem a little off for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.

I go to a restaurant and I can't just walk into the kitchen and grab a plate of food. Nor can I walk into the refrigerator, grab some supplied, and then walk over to the stations and start cooking. Instead I have wait to be seated, order indirectly via a waiter, wait for the chef and staff to prepare more order, etc...

It seems to me visiting a website is similar. The user choose to visit the site. That includes the 3rd parties and less controls. Just like I don't get to pick what sources the restaurant used for their food, nor do I have any say in their hiring or management practices. Nor do I have any choice in the music they play or the TVs they have on (bar like restaurants often have TVs). If I don't like their choices my choice is to be or not be a customer. I don't get to hack around that, walking in the back door and taking the food.

I know the analogy isn't perfect. It's my computer and I have no obligation to let them use it as they please vs as I please. But still, there's some middle ground IMO between the 2 extremes.

>the criticism seem a little off for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.

IMO the reason is quite easy to put the finger on:

It's because it is framing the problem squarely as one of the user, culminating in the phrase that one is "voluntarily choosing".

If you don't want to do research and customize scripts for every friggin' domain/website (and having to do it again when the site structure changes), there is no "voluntary choice".

If you don't want to accept that this "solution" has to forgo a lot of essential characteristics of hypermedia, there is no "voluntary choice".

If you're not technically versed in these things, there never was a "voluntary choice" to begin with.

In general, if you want to use the World Wide Web remotely as it is intended, there is no "voluntary choice".

> I'm just as upset by bloat and tracking as well but the criticism seem a little off for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.

I think you're unclear in your mind about the relationship between you and the website you visit.

To use your restaurant analogy, browsing the web is more like ordering delivery. You send a request for food from the menu and money to cover it, and a while later, a driver with a bag arrives at your doorstep. That bag contains the food you order, some packaging, often plastic cutlery, and some advertising. The transaction between you and the restaurant involved exchanging money for food, and the restaurant doesn't get to have any further say about what you do with that food. You're free to throw away the box, the cultery and the advertising leaflets into the bin, and give half of the food to your cat. They cannot, technically or ethically, make you eat the food out of the box it came from, while reading the advertising leaflets.

It's like that with web browsers. You ask for content (via HTTP), you get a response that includes links to other things you're invited to request. You're free to cut the response up and render it the way you like, you're free to request or not request the other linked resources. That was how the web was designed to work, that's how HTTP protocol is meant to be used. Now plenty of websites will try to insist they're more like dining in than delivery, but that's just them trying to guilt-trip you into making them more money. It's not something they're entitled to.

Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge all include the ability to block certain requests.

https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/netw...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Network_Monit...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/devtools-gui...

The web's first browser, working in line mode, could probably request the text, and only the text, of an article from nytimes.com. It has no capability to automatically follow links to ads and trackers.

https://www.w3.org/INSTALL.html

The long line of sed is out-of-date and thus "broken". For something simpler that works, try this:

   nyt tr |sed 's/ *//;/</!d'|uniq > travel.html

This will produce a simple web page of titles and URLs for each article page.

An interesting point of discussion might be the amount of third party cruft on the template article page versus the more dynamic front page. When Javascript is disabled, on each article page all images display and there are no ads. Downloading any video in the page is as simple as

   curl -O `grep -o https://[^\"]*mp4 article.html`

You're right, I guess, if you consider "the web" to mean "HTML over HTTP". In real terms, though, a modern web site is the HTML plus all of the images and other text that goes with it, and it's designed as a package. The fact that the web browser connects to the web server to download all of the bloat doesn't change the fact that the bloat was specified by the HTML served by the web site. It's just an implementation detail.

Pro comment here which should be way higher up the page. Good comment content, good Unixbeard vibe, great use of sed.