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A comment on Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to HTML5.

Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by pkorzeniewski on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @10:46AM (#5368754)
What strikes me most is how websites are visually getting more and more minimalistic and at the same time they're loading and working slower. For example The New York Times [1] layout is as simple as possible (basically text only with some images), but it loads 20 JS files, 13 CSS files, makes ~200 requests and uses ~14 MB of memory on load.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/

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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by anon1385 on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @12:01PM (#5369274)
A year ago the average total transfer was something like 937kB and now it's 1311kB, at least according to these stats: http://httparchive.org/trends.php#bytesTotal&reqTotal
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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by STRML on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @10:57AM (#5368870)
It's hard to believe that a site with that kind of traffic & resources hasn't even bothered to concatenate and minify its JS & CSS. Most of the JS files still have comments. Bizarre. They should know better.
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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by jedahan on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @11:02AM (#5368910)
I like to think they are trying to preserve the spirit of being able to right click->view source and learn a thing or two. Geocities + view source did spark early interest for myself in coding.

Maybe sourcemaps will help with that in the future.

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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by networked on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @05:41PM (#5371307)
Source maps in JavaScript are a cool idea. More people should know about them [1][2].

[1] See, e.g., http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/developertools/source...

[2] ...or http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/tools-and-tips/source-maps....

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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by robmcm on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @01:21PM (#5369742)
Perhaps adding a commented link in a minified file to a full version? Wouldn't be hard to automate.
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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by ChrisLTD on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @02:46PM (#5370287)
I've added that to a site I'm about to launch. Seems like a good compromise.
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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by joonix on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @11:45AM (#5369190)
Geocities view-sourcing. Thanks for taking me back.
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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by walshemj on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @08:23PM (#5372216)
its old school publishers who often have very little idea what they are doing and have sclerotic development processes 9 week sprints! in one case.

One site I worked on did not manage to sort out a redirect of its .net version of its domain and its over 2 Years since a flagged this as a high priority problem.

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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by lchang on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @08:31PM (#5372276)
Yes, but the New York Times employs top-notch webdevs.

See http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/ and http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/

So they have the skills, but maybe it's for other reasons they don't follow those practices.

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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by pinwale on Thursday March 14, 2013 @01:00AM (#5373186)
The New York Times built the current site in 2006. The Times just announced that they have are working on a new site design (and presumably completely new architecture) for the last year and should release it soon.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/prototype/

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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by walshemj on Friday March 15, 2013 @01:16PM (#5381669)
There is a world of difference between doing a cute vanity project that works for say 99% of the time but doesn't mean that they buckle down and do the hard work involved delivering a major publishers site.

Another example Google has a lot of smart people but they cant parse a robots.txt file with a BOM in it.

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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by meerita on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @10:59AM (#5368886)
The NYT website is not something usual. That's a website made up for a newspaper, a giant newspaper, with dozen of business, info and other resources playing a role of importance in the frontpage. But I'm with you: the web even with HTML5 can be fatty, pretty fat, but I prefer this, than Flash one, forever.
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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by ygra on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @11:30AM (#5369106)
Newspapers had Flash websites?
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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by meepmorp on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @01:26PM (#5369782)
For video and other multimedia content, sure. The NYT, at least, has a fair amount of such content.
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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by NuZZ on Thursday March 14, 2013 @05:23AM (#5373943)
My god. How underpaid were the web devs of this site? They must have gotten to the point where they could proclaim "It works now!", then thats when the funding must have been got cut off. It's that or, they are just bad. Meanwhile, the site looks bad.

It's really, really not hard to use image sprites (not necessary here); merged JS and merged CSS.

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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by g8oz on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @01:20PM (#5369737)
NYT is best accessed with JS turned off. Also Ghostery FTW in general.
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Re:Lousy web design trends that are making a comeback due to... by habosa on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @11:52PM (#5372980)
Two HUNDRED requests? How is this acceptable for a website that's so frequently accessed via mobile. With latency ~30ms you're wasting 6s before you even download anything!
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