How would you sell your touring rig?

I think you're being a bit defensive

So if you say negative stuff about someone's website and they respond, then they are "being a bit defensive"? What am I supposed to do, just relax and accept everything you say? I don't accept it, sorry if you find that inconvenient.

For example if you have 9 separate images loading just to share your technology stack, there is no justification to merge scripts into a single HTML file, which destroys the benefits of caching over several pages. That is all.

I have no idea what this means. There are images on the home page which are for the various open source tools I use. The files are tiny by today's standards, as is the amount of text being served. What are you saying should be split up? The tiny amount of text? This would only increase the number of requests made by the browser, which increases latency. All websites that do this seem slower, to me at least. The theoretical gains by caching common text between pages isn't going to happen, because most of the time the content is specific to the page being served, e.g. timestamps (in the footer) or links with versioned parameters (in the navbar) so that even with the reverse caching proxy, users can still get the most recent versions of pages when they have been changed recently (too long to go into detail here, but trust me - it's required in order to combine successfully a dynamic site that is updated very frequently with caching). I know what I'm doing, been doing it for 20 years.

I disagree that being clean and readable are personal preferences. For example long lines of text with small line spacing are poor for readability, this is known empirically, and far pre-dates the internet as a whole.

Well that's odd, because I find websites that force the text into a narrow column that stays the same width no matter how wide I make my browser... irritating. I know from comments I've read elsewhere that I'm not alone. I am aware that studies have shown that shorter lines are easier to read, but that's not all there is to reading. Many people prefer denser presentation of information, and find lots of whitespace just wasteful and annoying. Taking away control from the user, trying to control every aspect of how the web page is presented, so it's like a printed page, is just going too far (in my book). See, it's a personal preference. You can claim science, but it's really not. Some people like one way, some people like another way. I don't roll with that whole "it's all been worked out and has to be like THIS otherwise you are out of date and wrong" meme. I've been around the block a few times, seen a lot of fads come and go, seen a lot of smart young people being way too smart (I was once one, pushing C++ and object oriented programming as the be-all and end-all of development back in the mid-1990's). People like to think they know the answer, the end, the final solution, but in reality it's all just smoke and mirrors. You find what works, you go with your gut, and my gut tells me that a lot of current "design" wisdom is just bullshit masquerading as science. Sorry.

But that doesn't mean people can't discuss their opinions of it, whatever they may be.

I never said you can't discuss it, and I hope you're not saying that I can't respond when you talk about it in terms that I find to be a little bit annoying...

/r/bicycletouring Thread Parent