World-Wide Web, Not Wealthy Western Web
There is so much good stuff in this last-minute talk from Bruce Lawson (Vimeo link) at the 2016 Fronteers Conference, be sure to watch it in its entirety. One of the reasons my site has such a spartan look is that I try very hard to avoid any unneccessary payload. There’s certainly room for improvement. However, looking at how much bandwidth is wasted by so many websites for what boils down to a worse experience for everyone, designers and developers absolutely need to re-examine their priorities. The AirBnB example in the talk is especially pointed, quoting:
[…] we’ve launched our first Holy Grail app into production! […] It looks exactly the same as the app it replaced, however initial pageload feels drastically quicker […] because we serve up real HTML instead of waiting for the client to download JavaScript before rendering. Plus, it is fully crawlable by search engines. […] It feels 5× faster.
Only JS hipsters would ever call a plain HTML page a “Holy Grail app”. Just. Wow.