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This weekend I decided to write a "simple" web app: an RSS reader. What started off easy ended up needing: * A proxy server to bypass CORS * OAuth to Google * Config/pref storage and management * Caching, auto-refresh * Type-ahead completion is nice, so why not that too..

* The ability to run somewhere, which in this case was Cloudflare Workers * A local dev environment * Abuse prevention * State syncing between devices * The ability to share * The ability to star/bookmark...

I'm not disagreeing with you but even simple web apps are super complex *by necessity* today. All of the things I mentioned above are basic features one might expect from a decent-but-still-not-too-complicated site. And all of this is before I worry about HA/resiliency in deployments.

The people that need to engage with this type of post most bounce off of headlines like this. I love these blog posts, but the typical defensive reactions are so common at this point that I wonder how we can better get people to rethink their positions here?

e.g. literally in this same thread, commenter points out that pages / features are more complex. They're right (to a degree), and yet miss the point that the end-result is still a poor user experience at the margins. I've been struggling with this comms issue now. Do you have any thoughts?

My approach has been to lean into the data, which works for some, but in much of the discourse polarizes further and makes people *more* defensive/look for strawman arguments. I think the comms issue is more nuanced than it might appear prima facie.

page size doesnt inherently mean a site is broken or not. comparing sofware of the gigabit speed era to that of the 56k era is senseless.

im all for optimizing performance, but if the suggestion is that developers should target the lowest end devices, thatll both inhibit desigj creativity and give manufacturers a pass from making their low end devices more capable

Since when design and creativity are inhibited by hardware limitations ? just take a look at the magic Nintendo manage to achieve on limited hardware from 80's til today.

Stop using high res images. Alex says no! Want to watch videos on your phone? Stop it! The 120fps 2k HDR screen you are holding should only be used for 8 bit graphics.

That's content. The grief is about the 1.5MB of JavaScript being loaded on a page that should serve the content and not be a photo editing app or a game in the browser. It's a glitch in incentives that would make things better if awareness is raised. At least IMHO

Sigh. Back in the early 2010s jQuery folks would defend the size of JS libraries because it's just the same as a JPEG. Years later they grew up and acknowledged that it wasn't equivalent. I guess it's 10 years later so we have to go through the cycle again.

That is fair. But that is not what he is saying. It at least not what the data he is pointing to is saying

I grew up (as a web dev fascinated kid) with the notion of your first page load (including non-content images) needs to be under 35KB and I want it back 😅