Link tags: parsing

I wasted a day on CSS selector performance to make a website load 2ms faster | Trys Mudford

Picture me holding Trys back and telling him, “Leave it alone, mate, it’s not worth it!”

ongoing by Tim Bray · Money Bubble

What we’re seeing is FOMO-driven dumb money thrown at technology by people who have no hope of understanding it. Just because everybody else is and because the GPTs and image generators have cool demos.

What’s going to happen, I’m pretty sure, is that AI/ML will, inevitably, disappoint; in the financial sense I mean, probably doing some useful things, maybe even a lot, but not generating the kind of profit explosions that you’d need to justify the bubble. So it’ll pop, and my bet it is takes a bunch of the finance world with it.

This is mostly about the intersection of finance, hype, and technology, but Tim mentions something that I’ve also been saying:

I’m super impressed by something nobody else seems to talk about: Prompt parsing.

Maybe it’s because I spent formative users playing text-only adventure games, but I am way more impressed by the way generative tools do natural language parsing than I am by their output.

JavaScript Bloat in 2024 @ tonsky.me

This really is a disgusting exlusionary state of affairs.

I hate to be judgy, but I honestly wonder how the people behind some of these decisions can call themselves web developers.

The Cost Of JavaScript - 2023 - YouTube

A great talk from Addy on just how damaging client-side JavaScript can be to the user experience …and what you can do about it.

radEventListener: a Tale of Client-side Framework Performance | CSS-Tricks

Excellent research by Jeremy Wagner comparing the performance impact of React, Preact, and vanilla JavaScript. The results are simultaneously shocking and entirely unsurprising.

28c3: The Science of Insecurity - YouTube

I understand less than half of this great talk by Meredith L. Patterson, but it ticks all my boxes: Leibniz, Turing, Borges, and Postel’s Law.

(via Tim Berners-Lee)

5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe | Filament Group, Inc.

The Jevons Paradox in action:

Faster networks should fix our performance problems, but so far, they have had an interesting if unintentional impact on the web. This is because historically, faster network speed has enabled developers to deliver more code to users—in particular, more JavaScript code.

And because it’s JavaScript we’re talking about:

Even if folks are on a new fast network, they’re very likely choking on the code we’re sending, rendering the potential speed improvements of 5G moot.

The longer I spend in this field, the more convinced I am that web performance is not a technical problem; it’s a people problem.

“Never-Slow Mode” (a.k.a. “Slightly-Fast Mode”) Explained

I would very much like this to become a reality.

Never-Slow Mode (“NSM”) is a mode that sites can opt-into via HTTP header. For these sites, the browser imposes per-interaction resource limits, giving users a better user experience, potentially at the cost of extra developer work. We believe users are happier and more engaged on fast sites, and NSM attempts to make it easier for sites to guarantee speed to users. In addition to user experience benefits, sites might want to opt in because browsers could providing UI to users to indicate they are in “fast mode” (a TLS lock icon but for speed).

Idiosyncrancies of the HTML parser - The HTML Parser Book

This might just be the most nerdily specific book I’ve read and enjoyed. Even if you’re not planning to build a web browser any time soon, it’s kind of fascinating to see how HTML is parsed—and how much of an achievement the HTML spec is, for specifying consistent error-handling, if nothing else.

The last few chapters are still in progress, but you can read the whole thing online or buy an ePub version.

AddyOsmani.com - JavaScript Loading Priorities in Chrome

A table showing how browsers prioritise a) the loading of JavaScript and b) the execution of JavaScript.

The 100 Year Web (In Praise of XML)

I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:

This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.

And they all have.

And they are all different.

Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:

The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.

Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.

Archiving web sites [LWN.net]

As it turns out, some sites are much harder to archive than others. This article goes through the process of archiving traditional web sites and shows how it falls short when confronted with the latest fashions in the single-page applications that are bloating the modern web.

The Cost Of JavaScript In 2018 – Addy Osmani – Medium

Addy takes a deep, deep dive into JavaScript performance on mobile, and publishes his findings on Ev’s blog, including this cra-yay-zy suggestion:

Maybe server-side-rendered HTML would actually be faster. Consider limiting the use of client-side frameworks to pages that absolutely require them.

Why Web Developers Need to Care about Interactivity — Philip Walton

Just to be clear, this isn’t about interaction design, it’s about how browsers and become unresponsive to interaction when they’re trying to parse the truckloads of Javascript web developers throw at them.

Top tip: lay off the JavaScript. HTML is interactive instantly.

Colossal Cave Adventure in Python

Text to +1 (669) 238-3683 to play now!

Exploring the Linguistics Behind Regular Expressions

Before reading this article, I didn’t understand regular expressions. But now, having read this article, I don’t understand regular expressions and I don’t understand linguistics. Progress!

Netflix functions without client-side React, and it’s a good thing - JakeArchibald.com

A great bucketload of common sense from Jake:

Rather than copying bad examples from the history of native apps, where everything is delivered in one big lump, we should be doing a little with a little, then getting a little more and doing a little more, repeating until complete. Think about the things users are going to do when they first arrive, and deliver that. Especially consider those most-likely to arrive with empty caches.

And here’s a good way of thinking about that:

I’m a fan of progressive enhancement as it puts you in this mindset. Continually do as much as you can with what you’ve got.

All too often, saying “use the right tool for the job” is interpreted as “don’t use that tool!” but as Jake reminds us, the sign of a really good tool is its ability to adapt instead of demanding rigid usage:

Netflix uses React on the client and server, but they identified that the client-side portion wasn’t needed for the first interaction, so they leaned on what the browser can already do, and deferred client-side React. The story isn’t that they’re abandoning React, it’s that they’re able to defer it on the client until it’s was needed. React folks should be championing this as a feature.

Can You Afford It?: Real-world Web Performance Budgets – Infrequently Noted

Alex looks at the mindset and approaches you need to adopt to make a performant site. There’s some great advice in here for setting performance budgets for JavaScript.

JavaScript is the single most expensive part of any page in ways that are a function of both network capacity and device speed. For developers and decision makers with fast phones on fast networks this is a double-whammy of hidden costs.

Transpiled for-of Loops are Bad for the Client - daverupert.com

This story is just a personal reminder for me to repeatedly question what our tools spit out. I don’t want to be the neophobe in the room but I sometimes wonder if we’re living in a collective delusion that the current toolchain is great when it’s really just morbidly complex. More JavaScript to fix JavaScript concerns the hell out of me.

Yes! Even if you’re not interested in the details of Dave’s story of JavaScript optimisation, be sure to read his conclusion.

I am responsible for the code that goes into the machine, I do not want to shirk the responsibility of what comes out. Blind faith in tools to fix our problems is a risky choice. Maybe “risky” is the wrong word, but it certainly seems that we move the cost of our compromises to the client and we, speaking from personal experience, rarely inspect the results.

Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today — Philip Walton

The reality is transpiling and including polyfills is quickly becoming the new norm. What’s unfortunate is this means billions of users are getting trillions of bytes sent over the wire unnecessarily to browsers that would have been perfectly capable of running the untranspiled code natively.

Phil has a solution: serve up your modern JavaScript using script type="module" and put your transpiled fallback in script nomodule.

Most developers think of <script type="module"> as way to load ES modules (and of course this is true), but <script type="module"> also has a more immediate and practical use-case—loading regular JavaScript files with ES2015+ features and knowing the browser can handle it!