Dan W.

How did I even miss THAT insanity!?!?

It's not discussed, and when it is the result is outright attacks, ridicule, scoffing, and a general hostility rooted in the fact that the propaganda, and illusion of a quality result is the first thing anyone sees.

Sadly, that's what often makes me so hostile on the topic; since it often ends up the same old "Do as we say not as we do" when it comes to ... civility. It's entirely acceptable to ridicule, dismiss, and attack separation of concerns, semantics, and every other good practice... but you DARE to go after these broken bloated "media darling" frameworks, preprocessors, and outdated methodology using the same basic level of disgust and disbelief, and magically now that exact same behavior is unacceptable. All because you dared to question the status quo.

You'd almost think the top "names" in the industry were running a giant scam centralized around these things.

That's still about 435MB of the data transfer everyday that doesn't need to be there.

It actually runs deeper than that, and consider when a product or product line warrants something like its own forums. This stuff scales up scary when you're talking about something like a million+ post forum with a thousand or more users visiting dozens of pages apiece. (I actually administered a forum like that for a decade, before being forced out by new owners of the related franchise)

Consider again the moving of presentational images, static style, and even static scripting out of the markup. What if this was for a forums like I described, where using the framework techniques you end up with an average HTML per page visited of 150k. If you have a thousand different users visit resulting in 30K page views a day. These numbers are within the norm of the forum I mentioned having administered at the time I left.

That's 4.5 gigs of markup per day. Now, let's say that all that's being delivered on the average page is 24k of plaintext and a half dozen content images. There's no need in most cases for that to be more than around 50k of HTML if semantics is leveraged You just reduced it from 4.5 gigs a day to one and a half. That's shaving off 90 gigs a month, often the difference between a $200/mo hosting plan and a $30/mo one. Which is why when you master these techniques and can deliver such reductions, site owners who "know better" won't bat an eyelash at being asked two grand, they know they'll make it back over time. Good business, good investment, and sound practices play the long-term game, not the petulant "wah wah, I want it now" games.

... and remember on sub-pages most of your presentational images, CSS, and so forth are cached so they aren't reloaded constantly. Only the markup with it's unique/different content is sent on each and every page-load. Because of this, it is possible for bloated HTML built with bad practices to actually total MORE bandwidth than everything else on the page! All it takes is traffic where visitors go to more than one page on the site!

That's something few people seem to realize, that if you have a site where people are visiting dozens of pages every time they come in the door -- aka a HEALTHY website with content of value -- your HTML throughput can actually exceed that of images, JavaScript, and external stylesheets COMBINED!

You don't hear a lot of framework fans talking about that, do you? It's a concept that on the face of it few would even think of, but if you understand networking traffic and how website caching works, it's actually pretty obvious.

... and that's before we even talk the processing overhead. Anything you do in the markup for any complex website is going to be put together by server-side code. That means the more markup you have, the harder that server has to work, the bigger the memory footprint, and the longer it has to sit there with the connection open.

That's where the "oh everybody has broadband" lame excuse falls apart so miserably, it still all has to be sent through the same pipe from the server, and that server's connection (or multiple connections, or multiple connects across multiple servers) only stretches so far before you end up throwing hardware and money at a problem that may not even have needed to exist in the first place.

... and it's why bloated code, especially HTML can -- for high traffic sites -- end up the difference between dumping thousands a month into managed dedicated servers, VPN's, staff sitting there nurse-maiding everything, etc, etc... and comfortably hosting on a $20/mo VPS where the most difficult maintenance task is running apt-get or yum once a month for updates.

But again few people take HTML seriously enough for that, much less thinks in these terms. It's sleazy, ignorant, dishonest, and infuriating the way most people treat and talk about HTML.

Poor performance and long-term cost overruns most always being the result of an industry filled with the attitude that the core language on which websites are based, doesn't actually matter and shouldn't be taken seriously when it comes to building websites.

You can see said attitude at every turn, the majority is open about it constantly saying things like "well that really doesn't matter". Really, the rules of the specification and intent it was built upon doesn't matter? Wow. That should tell you ALL you need to know about the people who promote frameworks and poo-poo vanilla coding.

Background images and decorative images are around 800KB total.

I would recoil in horror at that many presentational images. Bet you dimes to dollars those images have zero relevance to the content since they're part of the template too, right? Wonder how many of those images could be vectorized to a single smaller font file, or have poor encoding, or are being wasted doing things that we haven't needed images for since CSS3 became real-world viable for deployment.

Aka all the things that have the Photoshop jockeys quaking in their boots as their relevance in the industry dwindles even further.

Jason Knight

Is it why there are services like WPEngine which specializes in hosting WordPress sites at a premium cost? They are freakin' expensive, but so many people recommend it for running a large-scale WordPress site. I used to think it was a good thing, but now, I am beginning to wonder why I shouldn't call such service a borderline scam selling on all the wrong reasons to lake in some cash instead of educating people that they might not even need a mega-power hosting if they build a website differently with cleaner code.

I'm also beginning to wonder whether making everything "easy" for the general public (Ex. Wix, WordPress, visual page builders, etc.) might not always be positive in a bigger picture. Here, we are getting into the territory of industry/social cost. I can't help thinking we are paying a high price for accepting bloated code base as something of a necessity/norm. What if the vast majority of websites utilized a much leaner code base? I imagine the traffic saving would be huge, and we might even have a better performance in general... Am I off-balance here, though?

Dan W.

They are freakin' expensive, but so many people recommend it for running a large-scale WordPress site.

I often think that's part of why there's no tearing rush to fix any of WP's real problem! There's no incentive to make it leaner when you can make a buck off the people suckered into using it. Who cares how many people are screwed over by it and how many businesses destroy their web presence, there will always be another sucker in the pipe if you just use Goebbels's "big Lie" to promote it.

The same way companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and other MLM's continue to exist despite clearly being nothing more than legalized pyramid schemes; aka business models that are unsustainable unless you routinely have everyone below the fifth or six tier give up and walk away after having their wallets drained.

... and thanks to the propaganda and outright bunko, even those burned, even those who lose their shirts, are slow if not outright incapable of embracing the idea that it was the scheme itself -- and not them -- which led to their failure.

Same as I keep comparing to with Apple, where the company can do no wrong and if something does go pear shaped those who've bought their products are so emotionally invested in it, everything that goes wrong has to be their fault, not Apple's.

I'm also beginning to wonder whether making everything "easy" for the general public (Ex. Wix, WordPress, visual page builders, etc.) might not always be positive in a bigger picture.

Thing is they're rarely actually easier in the short term or the long run, given how hobbled the results. They have the illusion of ease created by -- again -- the "big lie" of repetition. You claim it's easy, you get people who are just starting out and convince them it is easy, you create a system by which they never learn any other way of doing things whilst simultaneously making them think they know the underlying technology. You give them what looks like a good result that sweeps all the problems under the carpet.

... and when it fails, you feign ignorance as to the problems, leverage a community of sycophants to stand up for it, and blame the end user. If they don't blame themselves and start to question the system itself, you ban, ridicule, and isolate them so the faithful aren't disturbed -- or even better you use them as an example of "this might happen to you if you don't stay true to the faith". There's a reason many stricter more extremist religions use the threat of excommunication to keep the flock in line. It's a proven mind control technique that politicians, preachers, and con-men use and falls squarely in the province of the propaganda technique known as bandwagon. Not only should you want to be part of the group, you don't want to be shut out. Oh, but it works for everyone else, the problem must be you. Etc, etc, etc. Again it's plain as day once you recognize the techniques.

Each of these systems -- wordpress, react, jquery, bootstrap -- have their own little echo-chambers. Worse, they interact with each-other as since they are all peddling the same lies, it is in their interest to work together to keep these lies afloat.

The apparent "ease" is an illusion, one dispelled the moment you start poking around under the hood and researching the underlying languages.

What if the vast majority of websites utilized a much leaner code base?

We probably wouldn't be careening towards a bandwidth crunch; whist sure then end users are getting more and more station to wall improvements in speed, nobody is building the new backbones to support it! The core infrastructure that gets you around the globe is pretty much the same as it was a decade and a half ago. The seven "tier 1" providers are doing jack-all in terms of legitimate improvement to match the demands of larger sites and faster provider-to-customer lines. They aren't going to either because if they did, it might cut into their over-the-top profits, even if that means said skimming off the top will eventually cause their businesses to fail.

It's a sad fact that many alleged "investors" have figured out that you can actually make a ton of money short-term by destroying a company's future, rather than risking the chance of long term investment. We don't have investors anymore, we have shareholders; there's a difference.

... and until the owners of the tier 1 providers are willing to reinvest in their businesses, we're going to see all the high speed connections of 45mb+ start to be unable to deliver their advertised speeds from anywhere but the local region. We're going to see latency spike resulting in the increase in the handshaking penalties during page-loads. This is looming on the horizon yet nobody is taking the steps on the hardware side to prep for it, nor are there many taking the time to at least try and slow down this "march towards death" by leaning out things on their websites.