Web Bloat

Via Daring Fireball, Maciej Ceglowski:

To repeat a suggestion I made on Twitter, I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature.

(...)

If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big.

That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew.

For a single tweet.

On a related note, Bauke Roesink recently asked a bunch of web developers what kinds of CSS frameworks they used. If there's any kind of bright spot in this, it's that a quarter of people responded with "none", making "none" the third most used CSS framework.

To quote Alex Papadimoulis:

What if I were to tell you...CSS is already a framework for styling HTML, and that by actually taking the time to learn it, one can make significantly less shitty websites that are actually responsive, don’t require a quad-core with 8GB of ram just to render, and that another front-end-developer who isn’t hip on whatever flavor-of-the-month bullshit framework can actually be able to maintain it?

This also applies to JS frameworks, by the way.