Alex Russell — Infrequently Noted

The Market for Lemons

For most of the past decade, I have spent a considerable fraction of my professional life consulting with teams building on the web. It is not going well.

Alex Russell — Infrequently Noted

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2023

To serve users at the 75th percentile (P75) of devices and networks, we can now afford ~150KiB of HTML/CSS/fonts and ~300-350KiB of JavaScript (gzipped). This is a slight improvement on last year’s budgets, thanks to device and network improvements. Meanwhile, sites continue to send more script than is reasonable for 80+% of the world’s users, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. This is an ethical crisis for frontend.

Kilian Valkhof — HTMLHell

You don’t need JavaScript for that

Because HTML and CSS features are handled by the browser they can be more performant, more native, more adaptable to user preferences and in general, more accessible. That doesn’t mean it will always be (especially when it comes to accessibility) but when the browser does the heavy lifting for you, your end users will generally have a better experience.

It’s totally a disaster right now, but don’t worry; there’s hope we’ll get it right this time!