The amount of functionality an application provides should be the benchmark for the size rather than one's available disk space. I'm sitting on 20TB+ of available storage and anything over 1MB for a simple "Hello World" is excessive.
The low lag part is especially impressive. Here is Wes Bos taking a deeper dive into the intricacies of technologies used to accomplish this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ
I've always assumed that making a fast and responsive website isn't a technical problem, but a social/political one.
It's easy to create a website where interactions simply fetch the necessary resources and update the DOM as required. But managers then insist on adding 20 trackers so every little click and interaction gets logged somewhere for analytics.
Of course they are. There's a significant overhead from a virtual DOM and reconciliation with the real DOM. Then there's the larger overhead from relying on JavaScript for everything. The JS VM in modern browsers is very performant, but it can't optimize poorly written code, whether that's from frameworks, the gazillion libraries modern web sites depend on for analytics, trackers, ads, shims, helpers, etc., and, of course, any custom JS specifically written for the web site.
Browsers can enable very rich and responsive interfaces, but web development is bogged down by the insane state of popular frontend stacks. There's a recent trend of rejecting this insanity (htmx, Nue, Datastar), which I hope gets us on a track where we optimize for user experience using native web technologies.
What would the cost of allowing random landing page generation be? Alternatively, an examples/showcase page could be useful in presenting the value proposition before potential user commits.
Thanks for the suggestion. It was a design decision I made to not allow landing pages that are not assigned to a user. I will consider rethinking that.
> Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice.
This is far from "clearest way possible", it's not even in the middle. This choice impedes communication which makes is less useful, by your definition.
> But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims
I find it difficult to believe that the author's aim was to share a story in such way that's unnecessarily harder to consume, by a large portion of people otherwise interested in their thoughts.
Anti-design[1] is a movement which rejects the over-sanitation of design. Type a random query into Google and click through the first few links. What will you see? An endless sea of black-on-white, sans-serif, grids of text.
Anti-design is effective in making things memorable and engaging. When I attended Davis, I first thought the Social Sciences Building[2] was a bit of an eye sore. It was intentionally designed to be challenging. Now it is one of my most vivid memories of the campus.
You find it difficult to believe? The person clearly worked hard to achieve this aesthetic. The font even sort of matches the illustrations. This is clearly intentional from my pov. This aesthetic was more important to the author than ease of reading/consumption.
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