Towel-snapping optimisation
===========================

Monday 13 February 2012 22:44

When your audience is mostly n00b front-end
strugglers, as a medium existing because of
publications and not solutions it's perfectly
reasonable to waste everyone's time adding another
chapter to the circle jerk that doing some Boston
Globe website apparently was. Otherwise it makes no
sense, for the following reasons:

There is no reliable way to determine the amount of
bandwidth a user is willing to spend on a single
resource. Because screen size is all we've got to
query in some mobile curious way that doesn't mean
it's usable or efficient to do so. So it's some
Spielerei to prepare for the magic event when there
is an API that we can use to determine the
bandwidth on a device? No, because mobile means
there isn't a single bandwidth on a device. Even an
API can't predict when conditions suddenly get
worse because a device moves from Wifi to Edge. In
such a volatile environment it's backward to keep
thinking in monolithic bitmapped resources arriving
after crafting a single request for it. There's
wavelets, progressive schemes and vector based
images that are much better at using bandwidth
flexible and efficiently because they can stream
until something determines there is enough
resolution, and resume when more is needed. But if
you're looking for a markup solution - because that
is what your audience is craving for - it's just
moving the same old protocol into another layer,
effectively offering the user no advantage. Just
wasting time waiting to get something into a
standard it shouldn't be in in the first place, but
apparently it's to hard to get
designer-slash-developers to ask server specialists
to solve their problems properly. That's why hey
are called HTML monkeys.

And even if you've gone through such great lengths
to prevent sucking redundant data over someone's
precious connection, only one click seperates that
user from going to another website that didn't and
makes the effect of your optimisations seem pretty
useless. It's like risking your life to remove a
single mine from a minefield and then claim you've
made an improvement in safety for the user. But
that user isn't going near your single safe spot as
long as all the other mines are still there. Nice
tech demo, but in the real world the whole
ecosystem the user operates in has to have some
minimal level to make it usable in he first place.
And the core of that ecosystem is still the
browser.

Browsers should do a lot more than just implement
web standards flawlessly. Initiatives like Opera
Mini show users can be given good tools without
some standards body first have to make a standard
for it, or every webmaster come up with his own
reinvention of what should be browser funcionality.
But if all HTML monkeys can do is markup and think
in markup they will never understand how to build a
browser and solve the real problems. They seem to
have enough issues grasping why browsers don't
function as they would expect them to work from
their markup viewpoint anyway.

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2012/02/13/towel-snapping-optimisation/