The Web’s Cruft Problem

http://developer.telerik.com/featured/the-webs-cruft-problem

by jsnell • 11 years ago

362 156 11 years ago

developer.telerik.com

markbnj• 11 years ago

I think "the web" in this case really means media sites and some retailers. The media sites don't have a clue how to make money, other than to include all the usual ad networks and tracking scripts and then sit back and hope. The ecommerce guys are obsessed with slicing and dicing visitor behavior and tracking conversions. Seems to me that outside these (admittedly rather vaguely defined) spaces the web is a much cleaner and snappier place.

keyboardwarrior• 11 years ago

Tend to agree with this. For instance big porn sites, where every byte count, rarely has major bloat.

williamcotton7• 11 years ago

The cruft is because the underlying economics of how data is hosted and distributed is flawed. The incentives between advertisers, readers, publishers, hosting and distribution providers are currently misaligned.

In other words, building an info-economic system based on "free" content that is supported by online advertising results in: the people who make the content don't get paid enough and the content itself is horribly mangled by advertisements and other priorities.

However, we can build other kinds of info-economic systems. Perhaps we could follow the model of publishing back when we still used copyrights as an effective way to align the incentives between authors and publishers. Covering the costs of hosting and distribution are a lot easier to manage when the content itself isn't hard-coded in to an ad-selling-machine as delivery options like BitTorrent or WebTorrent are now an option. Permanent seeds could be kept alive at very little cost to publishers. Perhaps we could experiment with royalties, or selling virtual shares in media, or buying virtual goods that list you as a supporter, or allow people to invest in the creation of and share ownership in media...

ommunist9• 11 years ago

I like the direction of your thought. However, the practical future may bring more of personal complex of intelligent browsing agents, pre-fetching info for the user, stripping out 'cruft' to make web useful again and ....m consumable after all. Good example is Safari Reader feature and Readability plugin for Chrome. Those are just the beginning.

williamcotton7• 11 years ago

That only satisfies the demands of the consumer. A functioning economic system needs to also reward the supplier and at a bare minimum cover their expenses.

The answers are right in front of us: just treat digital media as property and follow the same model of copyright that's been working for over 300 years. The issue has been that tracking ownership and the accounting around payments wasn't able to keep up when things went purely digital. These were tasks that were at one point fully monopolized and facilitated by government and still are to some extent with things like SoundExchange.

Right now the only things worth owning are shares in the aggregators, not the actual media itself. Digital media is no longer even remotely aligned with the interests of authors.

In music for example, Sony didn't directly license content to Spotify, it wanted equity in Spotify itself. Whatever deals are being signed are done without the consent nor consideration of the authors. Tidal is a service where a few artists realized they need to own equity in the aggregation service because their ownership over songs and recordings has become worthless.

Intellectual property is a fantasy. It is a legal construct. The only reason we've ever had a vibrant market economy of books, music, and movies is because we set up the legal and accounting frameworks to make it possible.

Whatever mess we've created over the last 20 years is really starting to show it's ugly side, especially in relation to music. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a wholesale musicians revolt when it comes to digital media. Vinyl sales are up year-over-year for coming on a decade now.

JupiterMoon• 11 years ago

You mean like a RSS aggregator and reader?

normloman2• 11 years ago

Copyright hasn't gone away. Media organizations still own the rights to content they produce, and can sue anyone who copies it without their permission. Now, de facto, there are many people who will rip content and publish it on their own site. But that's not the plauge that's driving media companies to cruft up their websites, and by and large, it's a minor problem, thanks to Google's filtering of duplicate content.

People aren't paying for content because the publishers are giving it away. Copyright doesn't change that. They own the rights to their own content, and are free to charge whatever they want for it, including nothing. If they want to put up a paywall, nothing's stopping them.

I want to make clear that content isn't suffering because people won't pay. Newspapers and magazines never made the bulk of their money from subscriptions. It was always about advertising. Thanks to Google, advertising's a commodity, and publishers can't charge what they used to for it.

The solutions you list may work, or they may not. But let's not confuse the copyright issue and the advertising issue.

williamcotton7• 11 years ago

But publishers have to give it away with the "ad selling engine" embedded right in the content or else they make no money because... no one will honor their copyright and funnel advertisement earnings to the rights-holders.

Look at FM radio. They run ads. The songwriter is entitled to royalties on that income because of our copyright laws and accounting infrastructure. Funny enough, the recording artist is not entitled to royalties because at the time this stuff went in to action it was assumed that radio airplay was a good advertisement for the record, and that's how the artist would be compensated!

The way we're doing thing right now with social media is if the songwriters didn't get any money from radio play. Facebook isn't paying anyone for the content they monetize. Neither is Google. They just index and aggregate and profit and ignore copyright. Imagine FM radio if it was like this. Every song would have to be an advertisement for something else for anyone to make any money.

That's exactly what's happened to our content. They are filled with advertisements and there is no way to remove them! This "web cruft" is a perfect example of this effect! Why can't I just get pure, clean content anywhere? Because then anyone could link to it, and in the process, sell some deodorant on someone else's behalf.

Facebook has realized this and, much like Apple, they've decided to act as a private monopoly of a content industry where they get to set their own royalty rates. They'll take 30%, the "content creator" takes 70%. They'll decide what is worthy of publication and what isn't. We figured out hundreds of years ago that this monopoly should absolutely not be run by a private entity.

Not only would it be much better for individual liberty, but it would be much much easier and apply to ALL content if we could just include royalty payments to rights-holders. That way I just put "content" on the Internet and then if someone happens to be slapping ads on it directly or indirectly, money is making it's way back to the people who made it or paid for it to be made.

I'm not really talking about anything novel here, just looking at some recent history of examples of how copyright has been used in contracts to the mutual benefit of many different parties, including artists, publishers and distributors.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

And the answer: "Why does CNN show ads? To make money. Why does CNN include tracking services? To learn more about the reader, to show more targeted ads, to make more money. Why does CNN use social media buttons? To get people to share the article, to get more page views, to get more ad views, to make more money."

And as ads make them less money they show more of them, or more intrusive ones. They a/b test where to put them or how to make them "appear" suddenly on the hope of stealing a click, and they try to disguise them as other news stories. But the bottom line is that the ad supported web at the ad rates people can get, is challenging at best and in cases like Dr. Dobbs Journal, well they give up.

d--b• 11 years ago

Strange that this is coming from telerik, a company that creates really heavy and closed javascript framework libraries, that you can probably load from their own domain. They definitely have their part of responsibility in that 'cruft'...

paulojreis• 11 years ago

I had about the same feeling. Telerik components come to mind when thinking about extra/unnecessary complexity.

ommunist9• 11 years ago

Oh, telerik also has wonderful system of web components for IIS, and its CMS powers Iranian governmental sites. Which given Iranian networks are not exactly the fastest, gives very interesting experiences for those inside the max2MBit world.

jeswin• 11 years ago

We can (must) judge this article on its own merit. While not particularly informative, it is well written and explains the problem very, very clearly. The examples and analysis make sense even to people who aren't developers. It helps to raise awareness about an important issue, and is a part of the solution.

Telerik's cruft is somewhat different from the cruft referred to in the article. They offer "rich" UIs, which we might hate, but is just what many companies choose when they try to replace their old Windows Forms apps with web apps. With modern browsers, they aren't really that computationally expensive. And in any case, they aren't responsible for the type of issues mentioned in TFA. Like loading from dozens of domains, interstitial ads, social media links, and 200+ requests.

Telerik's products cannot be evaluated in isolation without looking at their history. They primarily cater to enterprise-y Microsoft shops, and they been in the business at least from the classic Asp.Net days (10+ years). Their components were DLLs earlier (which they probably still offer), but have now moved to somewhat leaner, modern JavaScript libraries. Their market moves very slowly, and it makes sense for them to move at a similar pace.

ommunist9• 11 years ago

You are right. However, the problem has no resolution in technical sense. When your boss tell you 'integrate that sh#t to this page now' you are just doing your job, right? You are not going to spend 4 nights developing technical proposal and organisational framework tailored to your employers business to introduce http2 and hire 3 interns to map external dependencies for the whole 50+ domains ecosystem, right? I did that several times in my life. Will not do that again.

yasth• 11 years ago

Telerik has been following Microsoft and going down the road to lighter, and more modern designs.

They still have a ways to go mind, but they have been gradually at least talking the talk. (Though I think most of their revenue remains in integrated stuff).

ommunist9• 11 years ago

The web today does indeed look broken. But this (oh, especially CNN) example is only to show that this problem is merely organisational. If there is no QA process in organisation, quality criteria are non-existent. If there are ever shifting bossy MBAs on top design positions, it will always be like that and get worse in time. The only thing we can do as "web crafters" is to make our personal sites suck less. When it comes to job, who will sacrifice job security for the sake of "better user experience"?

alistproducer2• 11 years ago

It's what it has always been. Sites/companies that go the extra mile and provide better user experiences get rewarded; other that don't lose market share. At the end of the day, if the content is good enough most people will deal with the crappy load times.

agumonkey• 11 years ago

People spends too much time improving technology and not content. Infinitely fast access to void is not worthy.

sanderjd3• 11 years ago

Sadly, I don't think this is true for individual content publishers. The size of any individual publisher's audience is not big enough for them to stay afloat with a clean user experience. Flipboard and Facebook pull this off by providing the better user experiences of "you can read everything" and "you're already on here anyway" respectively, but that wouldn't work for someone like CNN.

billyhoffman3• 11 years ago

There is a major thing going on here that is not mentioned in the article: One department doesn't deliver a website.

Is that "Terms of Service" modal there because a front-end dev thought "interrupting the user experience is a great idea!" No, it's there because of legal. And all those social sharing widgets? They are there because of marketing. And the 5 different ad exchanges? They are there from Sales/BizDev. And that 400KB of JS crap? That's Optimizely and their crappy A/B testing library that the dev team put it. And that hero image that's actually 1600px wide and then resized in CSS to 400px? It's there because that was the source image from the external agency and no one thought to modify it.

The biggest challenge with modern web sites/apps is that they are largely built by committee. Often its not literally built by a committee, but I mean that while multiple departments are all involved and all get to add to the site, but no one is really responsible for the final, overall user experience of the site.

And even if there is a "user experience" or "performance" team, they rarely have the power to change things. A customer of ours is a Alexa top 100 B2C company that provides a market place for buyers and sellers. They get commissions from sales, but a large part of revenue is ads. The "performance team" makes no head way against any of the terrible performance problems with ads because the ads team is judged based on the ads/conversions, not on performance of the page. Even when the ads are hurting the conversion rates of the sales/commissions, the ads team doesn't care. It's total deadlock of departments saying "performance and user experience is not my responsibility, I only do X".

ommunist9• 11 years ago

that is exactly my point. And even when you have a single professional webdev/design team, you have no power over legal restrictions (EU cookie widget) or contractual obligations boss signed (ads must appear next morning). Real world just goes forward. Users have more power with adblockers over their UX than UX designer.

eterm• 11 years ago

One way you can avoid the need for an EU cookie widget is by not setting unneccessary cookies.

sanderjd3• 11 years ago

It seems like there are two separate kinds of cruft: stuff that is distracting and gets in the way (social buttons, privacy policy modal, big nav-bar with temperature, ads, etc.), and stuff that happens in the background and doesn't get in the way, but makes things slow (multiple ad network embeds, optimizely, analytics scripts, etc.). While I agree that the first category has a lot to do with organization structure and incentives, the second category seems like it may be a good business opportunity for a new generation of "low-cruft" solutions to the same problems. For instance, I was kind of astounded that optimizely only has a crufty javascript solution, rather than a (probably far more complex) less crufty pure server-side solution, and I spent awhile looking around for such a thing, but found nothing much. Or something that puts all the tracking and analytics that different departments want to do behind a single optimized script (maybe segment.io already does this?).

tl;dr; The problem that lots of different people that contribute to a website are vying for the user's attention in different ways doesn't seem to have a technical solution, but the problem that we're making too many third-party requests that respond with too much data and/or run too much javascript seems like one that could be solved if tools focused on it.

Touche4• 11 years ago

I would say the biggest problem with pages like this is that it "jumps" around as content is loaded. The fact that ads are lazy loaded is not bad (probably good actually!).

This is easily fixed by simply having the container set to exact width/height so that it doesn't mess with the rest of the page when it loads.

CNN also has a sidebar that pops in with other stories. Don't do that. Render it on the server.

Just a couple of fixes like this and the page would be fine, even if some extra stuff takes a while to load. They key from the user perspective is that the article should immediately be readable when the page loads.

baudehlo• 11 years ago

Segment(io) doesn't have a solution for this, in case you decide to go searching. And their server side APIs have plenty of issues of their own (eg no way to get utm parameters to the destination - hugely frustrating and we are still working with them on that).

nickbauman• 11 years ago

Conway's Law writ as Web Cruft.

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

And that hero image that's actually 1600px wide and then resized in CSS to 400px? It's there because that was the source image from the external agency and no one thought to modify it.

And because of retina iPads and Macbooks.

Spivak• 11 years ago

True, but they could be doing better by serving the appropriate image size depending on the client.

JustSomeNobody• 11 years ago

Back in May, TheNextWeb made some changes. Their mobile experience at the time had two bars, one at the top and one at the bottom. Even on a large phone display, viewing the content between the two was very distracting. Also, they both had icons for twitter and Facebook. I gave them some feedback regarding the design and said that I felt it was a UX mistake. The VP of design got back to me and said, very politely, that he disagreed with my assessment. He went on to say basically that an increase in shares means an increase in page views which means an increase in ad impressions, and thus income. With TNW being an ad-supported company, this directly relates to the quantity and quality of our content. This lead me to feel that the single driving motivation was not that their users had a good experience, but that they maximized revenue. From a user point of view, I feel that's wrong. From a business point of view, it does make sense.

Regarding who is responsible for the final content, I would assume that if you have a VP of Design, that's the person. Maybe I'm wrong.

I notice now that they only have the one bar at the top. Interesting.

austenallred• 11 years ago

Optimizing for specific metrics is dangerous, and makes a big difference

mgkimsal• 11 years ago

They're possibly optimizing for the wrong metric, or at least a metric you don't care about. I'd think they'd want repeat viewers. A bad UX will mean fewer repeat viewers, and possibly an unsustainable business. Classic short-term vs long-term view. Problem with this is it's generally harder to measure long term, so short term becomes easier to justify.

ryandrake• 11 years ago

This is typically the role of a project's Product Manager: to balance the needs (or perceived needs) of all internal stakeholders (development, design, marketing, sales, legal, and all the various other isolated silos that don't talk to each other) with the interests of the end user. You need someone empowered to say no to crap, because every company is filled with people trying to load crap into the products, even developers.

Weak/ineffective Product Manager roles are set up to simply report to one department, for instance Marketing, and just do everything they want. Effective ones have the power to say things like, "We're not doing this awful UI element just because legal says they want us to." and "We're going to stop taking requests from sales until we improve product quality." You need one person who is directly responsible for the entirety of the product, who can't escape responsibility with the standard "not my department".

williamcotton7• 11 years ago

The problem for these Product Managers is that the incentives between the different stakeholders are drastically misaligned at a fundamental level.

The people in charge of community, design, content and publishing are actively fighting the demands of the parts of the organization that drive profits.

Companies that use advertisements to subsidize free content have sales and marketing teams that need to interrupt the goals of all of these other functions in order to keep the organization alive.

However, if you look at the incentive structure for say a traditional book publisher, the marketing and sales don't actively fight the content because they don't put adds inside the covers. They just sell the finished product.

Sure, market appeal might affect the kind of content that gets invested in by a publisher, but it doesn't affect how the content is presented.

ryanSrich• 11 years ago

But a company that relies on ad revenue that sees no change in revenue when the experience is slow or "bad" wouldn't hire a Project Manager to put UX first. Why would they? It wouldn't fall in line with their company objectives (read: make more money)

tikhonj• 11 years ago

This might also explain why mobile apps by the same company serving the same content and, presumably, contributing to the same business model somehow manage to have less cruft[1]: there's a single gatekeeper team for each app.

It's funny how the important difference between apps and web pages is entirely arbitrary, social and historical and not based on the underlying technology—the concrete difference between the two.

[1] Or, at least, that's been my experience. As a concrete example, take a look at the BuzzFeed app[2] which only has the prominent social buttons as visual cruft.

Of course, the rest of the cruft on the Buzzfeed mobile page were two (!) links to their app...

The CNN app[3] is probably a better example, with the app being almost completely cruft-free.

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buzzfeed.a...

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cnn.mobile...

altcognito• 11 years ago

Pessimistic me says that's mostly because the market has not matured. Ads and cruft will arrive eventually.

tosseraccount• 11 years ago

... they are largely built by committee

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

-Mel Conway ( http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html )

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

I always find it amusing that our capitalist system basically consists of competition between command economies as succinctly described above.

Touche4• 11 years ago

There are some strong points in this article but I think it reaches the wrong conclusion. Flipboard and Instant Articles are not an alternative business model. They are a loss-leader, plain and simple. The goal is still to get you on their webpage where you'll see the ads.

Good ole capitalism solves this problem quite easily. CNN banks on its brand to keep people coming to their site but there are plenty of non-terrible news sites on the web so for those who care about a nice user experience can just use those instead.

ised2• 11 years ago

I enjoyed this article. But I have one nitpick.

The author suggest HTTP/2 as a solution to web cruft.

I could be wrong, but I see the HTTP/2 ploy as a proposed way to deliver more cruft, faster.

What do you think is going to be in those compressed headers? How large do HTTP headers need to be? What exactly are they trying to do? I look at headers on a daily basis and most of what I see is not for the benefit of users.

We can safely assume the compressed headers that HTTP/2 would enable would have nothing to do with advertising?

Again, I could be wrong, but in my estimation the solution to web cruft (unsolicited advertising) is not likely to come from a commercial entity that receives 98% of its revenue from web advertisers.

The web cruft problem parallels software bloat and the crapware problem (gratuitous junk software pre-installed on your devices before you purchase them).

The more resources that are provided, e.g., CPU, memory, primary storage, bandwidth, the more developers use these resources for purposes that do not benefit users and mostly waste users' time.

This is why computers (and the web) can still be slow even though both have increased exponentially in capacity and speed over the last two decades. I still run some very "old" software and with today's equipment it runs lightening fast. The reason it is so fast is because the software has not been "updated".

billyhoffman3• 11 years ago

HTTP/2 largely won't help the problems mentioned in the article. If I'm loading 200+ assets for 30-50 hosts, HTTP/2 can't help because I'm making 30-50 TCP connections and fetching 5-8 resources over each. The efficiency of HTTP/2 over HTTP/1.1 really doesn't excel when fetching so few resources per connection.

HTTP/2 helps when you are downloading 200+ assets for 1 or 2 hosts.

ised2• 11 years ago

I routinely use HTTP/1.1 pipelining from the command line to retrieve 100 assets at a time. But these are assets that I actually want: i.e., the content.

Somehow I doubt that the 200+ "assets" coming from 1 or 2 hosts automatically when using a web browser authored by a corporation or "non-profit organization" that is connected to the ad sales business are going to be "assets" that I actually want.

imauld• 11 years ago

That was my first thought exactly, a "faster" protocol will just be used to send me more crap faster.

andrewstuart22• 11 years ago

It won't serve to eliminate cruft, but it will drastically reduce the effect it has on load times, which is a very significant part of the problem. If server push and connection multiplexing are used right, you could load an entire page in 1-2 round trips.

Hopefully, a lot of that second round trip would be extraneous (ads/tracking/etc) and the user can start using your content immediately.

qu4z-2• 11 years ago

I'm glad the web has finally advanced to the point where we can finally load an entire page in 1-2 round trips.

Sorry, I'm feeling unnecessarily snarky today.

byuu2• 11 years ago

I could be wrong, but I see the HTTP/2 ploy as a proposed way to deliver more cruft, faster.

Could not possibly agree more. I tried my own HTTP/1 site in that site-tester, and it has a 105ms response time for entire pages. And my pages are dynamically generated.

HTTP/2 (and especially the Mozilla/Google-imposed TLS requirement) takes away the simplicity of the web. The thing that allowed you to write a few lines of code, and suddenly your old Commodore 64 was a web server. Increased complexity is going to lead to more and more of a monoculture, which is going to leave us all more vulnerable to attacks (like with OpenSSL and Wordpress.)

The article is also a little bit ironic for me. He speaks of unnecessary widgets added to pages, yet his unnecessary sidebar is overlapping the text in the article, cutting off the ends of every line, and even maximizing the window doesn't get rid of it ( picture: http://i.imgur.com/qJeyP5v.png ). I had to use "inspect element" to delete the sidebar to read the page in full. (I'm sure it doesn't happen for everyone or it'd have been fixed, but it does on my browser.)

cocoflunchy• 11 years ago

Not sure why he took CNN as an example instead of this very article... http://i.imgur.com/4w9TxOw.jpg > 146 requests, 1.8MB transferred.

TheWoodsy• 11 years ago

I ended up with 67 Requests and 2.8M. uBlock Origin > Flash disabled > Going through a Squid transparent proxy with SquidGuard lists from shallalist.de (adv,anonvpn,remotecontrol,spyware,tracker)

jessaustin• 11 years ago

Some parts of the web are worse than others. He must hang out at Telerik a lot.

_53mz• 11 years ago

CNN is a fairly reputable news organization, and a pretty good example of how broadcast can have a strong digital presence. They're going to be mimicked by other news organizations without a doubt.

Compare them to a local TV station's site, and what you'll see there is basically video clips dumped onto articles or section fronts. CNN takes the trouble to write news copy alongside script (or are at least pretty good at rewriting) because you can't just repurpose TV script for a news article.

And in other news, http://www.cnn.com/cnn_adspaces/

DarkLinkXXXX• 11 years ago

That's strange. I get much different figures. https://veuwer.com/i/2uys.png

Perhaps they're working on it?

detaro• 11 years ago

Did you clear the cache beforehand? (since you don't have "disable cache" checked)

andrewstuart22• 11 years ago

If you'd finished the article, you'd probably notice he says (twice) exactly why he used CNN. Not that they're one of the worst, but rather that this is pervasive.

Again, I don’t mean to call out CNN as the “bad example,” but rather use them to show a specific example of a model that has become pervasive for content on the web.

dredmorbius3• 11 years ago

With JS enabled TFA killed my (old) Android browser. Twice.

Disabling JS I managed to read it.

odiroot• 11 years ago

But I like my weather widget on news sites. It's the second most useful feature beside the articles.

Naturally it doesn't make sense if it shows weather for a place across the ocean.

myth_buster• 11 years ago

This is incredibly ironic as I've used Telerik components for internal app development in our organization and the amount of cruft that gets loaded is way damn high. The payload is high and round trips are numerous. I ditched all that and developed my own framework from scratch using the open source libraries and managed to reduce the payload and increase responsiveness.

At some point in the past, it made sense to pay Telerik boat loads of money to get libraries that were supposedly plug-and-play but now there are even better solutions available for free thanks to OSS!

Edit:

  Sounds a lot like Flipboard doesn’t it? If you’re a publisher and you opt in, 
  you let Facebook control the distribution of your content, in return for a far 
  more performant experience for your readers, and presumably shared ad revenue 
  of some sorts.

This raised some red flags! Making Fbs(Facebook/Flipboard) the content platform just to reduce cruft and responsiveness appears to be a trojan horse and appears to have similar issues as discussed in the Fb Fraud thread [0]. Another possibility is Fbs(Facebook/Flipboard)would become the Comcasts of tomorrow. The distributed nature of the web is what makes it so invigorating and democratic and I think it would be a mistake to go the cable route.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514

joedavison2• 11 years ago

Care to share any great OSS libraries you've found that are good replacements for various Telerik components? Thanks!

warfangle• 11 years ago

Disclaimer: the last time I used Telerik components was in ASP.net 2.0 about 9 years ago.

For React: http://material-ui.com/#/

Bourbon + Refills: http://refills.bourbon.io/

Material Design Lite: http://www.getmdl.io/

Bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com/

etc, etc. Even back when I used telerik components, it was often faster to develop my own component, tailored to use-case, than it was to figure out how the hell to customize the 15-deep DOM tree that a table component generated.

guscost• 11 years ago

I've looked for a decent widely-compatible DatePicker alternative, and have not been successful. The Kendo DatePicker is a very nice implementation (it works all the way back to IE8) of the one self-contained widget that I'd really prefer not to hand-roll.

As for other Kendo UI components, I've found the ComboBox, DropDownList, NumericTextBox, and MaskedTextBox somewhat useful, in that they set up quickly and look nice. My typical approach is to use Bootstrap for whatever it has built in, and then Kendo UI with the Bootstrap theme for some extra widgets. Watch out though since they use different box models: http://docs.telerik.com/kendo-ui/using-kendo-with-twitter-bo....

I don't recommend using the Grid for anything but quick-and-dirty development, since any customization is almost inevitably going to be way less enjoyable than maintaining a hand-rolled solution (although the hand-rolled solution will probably take a lot longer to implement at first). The Scheduler is kinda nice but I have the same reservations about it. And don't get me started on the MVVM implementation.

But the good news is that all the basic form input controls (including the DatePicker) are Apache licensed! Until there are more stable and compatible widgets built with React I'll be using them fairly often: https://github.com/telerik/kendo-ui-core

Also, here's the script I use to wrap Kendo widgets in React components: https://github.com/guscost/kendo-react-wrappers

ripter• 11 years ago

Same experience here. Back when I used Telerik they where some of the largest and slowest components I'd ever seen. Even their own homepage was unbearably slow at the time. This was many many years ago.

ssharp• 11 years ago

The company I work for uses Telerik's CMS product, which loads lots of cruft onto your pages and is very slow. I walked away with the same feeling as you did after I read this.

AndrewKemendo3• 11 years ago

Isn't the fundamental issue here that nobody wants to actually pay money for web content?

Solve that and you solve the cruft issue.

bpyne3• 11 years ago

I don't think the issue is people not wanting to pay for content. The Web breaks apart for-pay models in different ways: people want content from more publishers than they can afford; and, people want to share.

Getting people to pay for content on the web is a tricky issue. Looking at it as a consumer, I don't mind paying, but to whom? "Walled gardens" tend to force you into a subscription model: pay "The Economist" (e.g.) annually and you have access to their content. In modern times, people read content from all over the place without respect for boundaries. Realistically, you will probably want content from more publishers than you can afford to pay in subscriptions.

Should publishers move to a model in which you pay per article? If so, how much? Do they price low ($0.10 USD) with the belief that more people will pay? Do writers get a percentage or flat rate? How is the quality of writing affected by each option?

How do we share content in a for-pay model? Communal reading and discussion is what people do. It's the same way with music. People share articles, music, and pictures with others who might be interested. In turn, sharing entices dialog and dialog entices relationship-building.

I don't think the issue is people not wanting to pay. The Web opened up individuals to a much larger set of publishers. Publishers in turn tried to keep a subscriber model while trying to curtail the very human desire to share. Solve the issues of not limiting people to small numbers of publishers and not limiting their ability to share, and you will reduce publisher dependency on ad revenue.

AndrewKemendo3• 11 years ago

Solve the issues of not limiting people to small numbers of publishers and not limiting their ability to share, and you will reduce publisher dependency on ad revenue.

I don't see how that fundamentally solves the problem of how you pay content producers. For a business model to survive you need to extract something from the end user eventually. With ads there is this turtle stacking problem - revenue comes from a consumer buying something from a retailer > retailer pays for ads on a website.

So at the end of the day there is an exchange of money, just not between the content producer and the consumer. If the desire is to kill the relationship between content and ads then the content needs to capture the revenue through another means - sales of hardcover books (internal ads), subscription services etc... there really aren't that many models.

Publishers are already very available, and sharing exists. Different channels for paying authors don't.

na85• 11 years ago

I would never consider paying for the vast majority of web content. Fully 99.9% of what I see and read online is total shit dressed up with JavaScript.

The cold hard truth is that most content on the web isn't worth even 10 cents per read.

minthd• 11 years ago

It's not hard to solve that problem ,theoretically.

Before an ad network serves me an ad, my reader app will see how much was paid for this ad, and will pay the sum for the removal of the ad. Of course there would be some settings menu defining the rules and amounts and behavior of this. And if i'm not willing to pay, i will be showed an ad.

mirimir2• 11 years ago

Publishers could charge whatever they're getting net from advertising. I can't imagine that it would be very much. Use some micropayment system. "Google gold" or whatever ;)

lcswi• 11 years ago

Weird, I constantly see communities rush to give money if a site is in danger because of money. I am not talking about '50 social media experts write lists about memes' sites but websites that came and come to be by intrinsic motivation to create and share. Be it a site about bicycles, simulation games or a plant species no one ever heard of.

api• 11 years ago

We had a similar problem in 1999. They called it 'portalitis' back then. Go find some shots of the old Yahoo homepage for an example.

Then Google came out with one blank and 'search' and we finally exited that ugly crufty era.

Now we're back!

smacktoward• 11 years ago

Such is the nature of cruft: it accrues. Like barnacles, the longer you sail your ship the more of it you will find encrusted on your hull. Eventually you have to roll up your sleeves and scrape it off, and when you do, you will briefly be able to enjoy a cruft-free state. But once you leave drydock, it will start accruing all over again.

cgriswald• 11 years ago

True, but I think there might be limits. I hate to think what 90's designers would have done with the massive screen real estate we have available today. Would it have been worse or would they have realized they'd saturated the human brains ability to separate objects?

Interestingly, the Google home page has more stuff on it today than it did back in 2001, but appears less crufty. Good layout seems to help eliminate some of the cruft. Stuff that used to all be relegated more or less to the center of the screen has been pushed away from the main search box; available, but not interfering.

http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010119175000/http://www.goo... versus https://www.google.com

Mobile is definitely cruftier, but mainly because of the smaller screen real estate and because if you don't have their app installed, they add a modal to prompt you to get it.

digisth• 11 years ago

Yeah. I'm sure many remember all the other stuff that came with it last time: flash banners, popups/popunders, auto-reopening windows, etc. It was mighty crufty.

I wonder how many other developers got into disagreements back then with other departments about how that stuff "was the future" and that there "was no fighting it" and that "everybody should just accept it now." Then we got clean / low-cruft designs for a while. Now we're back indeed.

Cruft is cyclical.

duderific• 11 years ago

Well to be fair, Google has a completely different ad model, so they don't need all that cruft on the search page. Instead they cruftify the search results page with ads. At least they're just text ads so the speed is good.

realusername2• 11 years ago

(My opinion here, I know not everyone is going to agree). What I really would like to have, is web capabilities without design, I mean the browser should be in charge of most design. What I would like is more meaningful tags like <panel>, <post>, <user>, <description>, <icon>, <horizontal-menu> and let the browser handle the actual representation. CSS could be just used for rough positioning + size indication and background-color could be completely replaced by a 'contrast' tag and the browser would display the color according to the user choice or operating system interface. The website would then adapt itself to the user and not the opposite.

vonklaus2• 11 years ago

This is starting to happen with things like google material and similar UI libraries that try to standardize appearances across devices. It isn't as granular as you are asking but I actually like that aspect. Delegating design and display to the browser isn't ideal for a lot of reasons. I would like to exercise control over how my content is displayed and regularly load in reset sheets for css. Display is something delegated to a framework not a browser (my opinion).

I think that <something/> should be in charge of handling representation and we are seeing that with ui frameworks that standardize displays across devices and applications.

background-color could be completely replaced by a 'contrast' tag

What? There are many different colors on websites and users are lazy. Also, css should ideally be for styling not positioning, but it is one of the only options right now.

realusername2• 11 years ago

It might be a strange (and incomplete) thought but how I see it is that the browser would deduce the color. Contrast would be relative to text. For example the panel has a contrast of 0.8, so the browser should chose a color which is readable according to the text color if we would put both on the same panel. This color could be picked from the OS design. It does not mean that it would be ugly tough since you can use pretty good designs and colors, the web would just look much more consistent.

_lce0• 11 years ago

I thought on this for a while.

The problem is that, as a user, I want to be in control, to dictate what's allowed and what not. But as developer, I want the browser to behave like I need to accomplish whatever the site is offering to the user.

So there's a conflict there. And the browsers should be the mediators, much like the OS is, at a different level.

If the web were merely declarative, we would have gotten a better web

byuu2• 11 years ago

I think the way to go is for the site author to offer their own content style. Then the user has the choice to use that, or to use their own style. They can default to whatever they want (theirs or sites'), and override on a case-by-case basis.

If a user is determined to view your site with different colors/fonts, then there's no reason to fight them. They could even have very legitimate reasons (poor eyesight needing bigger fonts, color blindness issues, etc.)

But for this to really work, we need to drastically decrease the variation involved in the site markup (HTML), and rely much more heavily on the styling (CSS) for page layout. HTML5 semantic elements don't go nearly far enough.

stevoski• 11 years ago

I was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia a few months ago. I wanted to see a film. I searched in Google for films showing in Kuala Lumpur. I found myself on a web page that, while accurately listing movies and schedules currently showing, looked like it had been created around 2000.

And it was fast. No animations, no auto-complete, no infinite-scroll, no JavaScript frameworks. Just the information I wanted, delivered to my phone seemingly as soon as I touched the link. Simple black-on-white text, plain layout.

This made me somewhat sad, because it showed me what the web browsing experience could have been today.

jkestner3• 11 years ago

Obligatory: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com

I'm glad I got off the train as web sites became web apps. I made one of the latter, though it actually was designed to complete certain tasks as opposed to being a container for content.

Websites now seem to be trying to emulate native apps - not just in terms of cramming a bunch of UI into a page, but also in the closedness. I hate how 95% of content sites bury the hyperlinks to anything that takes you off their site, including the source.

keithpeter2• 11 years ago

The mfws page is 5k or so and one script (and I might want to fight about that depending on the reason it is there - see the page code at the bottom).

Suppose you had another 5k budget for css. What could you do with it to make the page look 'nicer' in the sense of closer to mainstream Web pages that ordinary people might use?

Edit: clarity

dredmorbius3• 11 years ago

With only a modest amount of "cruft" (1216 bytes of CSS):

http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB?editors=100

S4M• 11 years ago

On the other hand, many people don't want to touch with a ten foot pole a website that doesn't look "sexy".

omouse• 11 years ago

Do we know that though? Many people who are users or are web devs or project managers or executives? I think that's why there's been a trendy towards minimalist design; it looks pretty good and it's typically fast.

jkestner3• 11 years ago

Even if that were true, the definition of "sexy" has changed over the years. Currently we're in a Rubenesque period.

bigger_cheese• 11 years ago

Yes I agree here. When I was in high school in the mid 90's I was able to create my own html pages in a text editor. The web was simple back then we had frames and tables and that was enough.

Sure it wasn't perfect pop up ads were rife, blink tags were a thing and internet explorer had problems with transparent gifs. But the web was simple. Nowadays html pages are riddled with javascript, CSS and I don't have a clue what is going on when I hit view source on the average website.

Webpages are massively over engineered you shouldn't need a scripting language to display an article of text and some links.

HelloNurse• 11 years ago

And now that we have HTML5 and CSS3 the technology for writing web pages with a text editor is better and simpler; many techniques and features have transitioned from impossible to easy or from convoluted hacks to straightforward. The two pillars of current web page overengineering are generating pages from server-side templates and preprocessors (not only automating cruft production but hiding horrible HTML and CSS code from users) and Javascript abuse.

Mithaldu3• 11 years ago

Minor gripe: I wish people would stop talking about Ad-Blocker. Pretty much since i started using the web (back when with Opera) I've had a tool available that is much more general and has given me much more control about how the web uses my bandwidth:

An URL-Blocker.

I don't use it for ads, exclusively, although lots of those fall under it too. I use it to block anything i find annoying when i use the web, be it overly big header images, fonts i don't like, Javascripts that are used by many pages to "enhance the experience", and sometimes ads too.

Thinking about it as a tool to only block ads, instead of one to customize the web and block urls themselves seems narrow-minded to me and misses the point.

stephengillie• 11 years ago

Please give us more details about the URL blocker you use. Is it a browser plugin? Is it a network change at the OS level (HOSTS)? Is it a firewall or routing block? Is it middleware in a container running in your VPC?

Mithaldu3• 11 years ago

I still use Opera 12 and it's built-in.

You can give it a file like this: https://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/urlfilter.ini

And it'll apply black/white-listing in whichever way you configure it before actually getting data from any URL. Editing features are built into the browser.

To have it available on a more global scale, you could probably use something like squid proxy, but i don't know if it gives power quite like that.

URL-Blockers however are a thing that by all rights should be built into the core of any browser, just like number-black-listing should be a default feature of every phone (but isn't).

emodendroket• 11 years ago

The Gruber quote is (as is typical for him, I guess) insane hyperbole. The mobile Web is not "looking like a relic" because I'm not going to go installing an app to read an article; that's more trouble than dismissing the modal yammering on about privacy policies.

amelius• 11 years ago

Don't worry. Eventually the cruft will get filtered out by AI, just like in adblockers, but in a much more powerful way.

Essentially, the circuits in your brain that remove cruft subconsciously now, will be implemented in software.

guelo• 11 years ago

The latest stratechery article discusses this same topic from more of a high level industry trends and business forces perspectives, https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/

Touche4• 11 years ago

Here's a first-pass user style sheet that gets rid of most of the noise.

   #breaking-news,
   [data-video-id],
   .sibling,
   .pg-rail,
   .js-gigya-sharebar {
       display: none;
   }


   body {
 	padding-top: 0 !important;   
   }

   .nav-header {
       position: relative;
   }

jasonsync2• 11 years ago

It's called "bloat". Maybe "selling out". To many hands on deck. VC's want profitability.

It resolves itself usually. Sometimes.

Websites get bloated over time. Difficult to read. Slow to load. Messy UI. Runaway code. Ads everywhere. People stop visiting. Less bloated alternatives appear.

Slashdot ... MySpace ... been there done that. Reddit, Imgur .. drifting slowly but surely towards bloat.

Mobile apps suffer too. To a lesser extent due to limited screen space. Poorly designed apps, non-native apps, heavy Javascript frameworks, ad popups etc.

Even worse, when a mobile developer decides to build a simple website for the first time.

Install Mercurial, Vagrant, Bower, NPM, Grunt, Mongo, Express, Mongoose, Passport, Angular .. update everything .. cache clean everything .. check your environment settings .. mess around with Heroku .. create a Docker image for easy deployment. Spin up a virtual machine.

Now hand off that 5 page website to someone else when the project is complete. They'll add bloat to bloat.

Better or worse?

The web is old. We're focused on apps. Eventually we'll move back to the web and clean things up.

Dysprosium• 11 years ago

Imgur is already bloated. As for reddit, I'm curious about what makes you think they're drifting towards bloating. They use JavaScript (replying to a comment creates a new textarea), AJAX (posting a comment), WebSockets (real-time updates of comment timestamps), modals (sign up), but they do this in a very moderate way and the result is really robust. It seems to me that they perfectly know the power of all these technologies but have a very strong QA which doesn't let a single shit get pushed in prod.

scrollaway2• 11 years ago

WebSockets (real-time updates of comment timestamps)

What are you talking about?

jasonsync2• 11 years ago

More of a prediction at this point ... that $50 million in VC has been pushing them towards possible bloat. Not so much on the tech side, but on the advertising and monetization side.

Perhaps the recent resignations have something to do with a pushback against that? Internal bloat will eventually show itself!

shostack3• 11 years ago

The Reddit shift is happening on mobile.

This morning I saw an ad for a Magic the Gathering game in my feed. They had been testing Reddit placeholder messages before so I knew it was a matter of time, but damn did that highlight that I REALLY hate feed-based ads.

Unfortunately, I'm sure it is the new reality. My main issue is that over time the feed gets "curated" in a way that drives more and more ad clicks vs. the view I want.

cognivore• 11 years ago

HOST file ad blocking. Bang! Problem solved.

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

This works so well I have a vastly different user experience than other people. I rarely see ads and pages load fast.

Of course, you can't do this on the stupid devices we use but don't actually control (phone, tablets, I'm looking at you), so I wish someone would offer a DNS service that blocks these. I'm thinking of creating one for myself at this point.

icandothis• 11 years ago

You can do this on any Android phone if you have root as it has a standard hosts file on it.

I used to use that exact hosts file on my phone but I found a compressed version that was for iOS and is only 28kb big. It blocks the same sites but it just a bit more lean.

userbinator• 11 years ago

If your devices use DHCP to get their DNS server, you can probably setup a firewall/router with the appropriate filtered DNS.

Animats• 11 years ago

Cruft removal suggestions:

1. Read the source of your own web pages. What's really necessary?

2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers?

3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed.

4. Stuff that's not going to change, including most icons, should have long cache expiration times so they don't get reloaded.

5. Look at your content management system. Is it generating a unique page of CSS for each content page? If so, why? Is it generating boilerplate CSS or Javascript over and over again?

6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft.

7. You can probably remove the IE6 support now.

Domenic_S• 11 years ago

2. Do you really need more than one tracker? Does anybody need 14 trackers?

Marketing answer: yes. GA and Omniture do different things/generate different reports. Each tracker usually does one critical thing better/differently than the last, so it's really easy for marketing to say they want all of them.

3. "Social" buttons don't need to communicate with the social network unless pushed.

Yes they do, because tracking.

6. Run your code through an HTML validator, just to check for cruft.

5KB of html cruft is nothing compared to the massive amounts of JS cruft being loaded (your point #2). This is wasted effort imo.

wangii• 11 years ago

#3 "social" button not communicate with the social network?

Good idea to kill fb/twitter!

andreapaiola• 11 years ago

Well... I try to do something...

http://andreapaiola.name/magpie/

narrator• 11 years ago

As far as the monetization of content goes, content creators are desperate because there is too much information out there. The people who make money with content these days are people who filter content and write for highly specific niches. I guess celebrity gossip and "Hottest Girls of Instagram!" also works pretty well as a content marketing strategy too. Give the devil his due.

One thing I hate about most content I get is how all the big stories of the day tend to creep in. I have a twitter account I use for personal marketing and I never ever post anything off topic or related to politics or whatever the hot meme of the day is. I only post information related to the very specific niche that I am covering. I pulled up my twitter feed recently and there are biotech people commenting on Greece. There are startup gurus retweeting Greece. If it's not Greece it's whatever is the hot topic of the day like <insert social issue that even saying you don't care about will result in social excommunication> or the Ukraine war or whatever. Frankly, I don't care, I don't have the time, it does not affect me personally. I have way too much stuff to think about already. This is why people don't pay for content. The supply is off the charts and the demand is not there and most people are just recycling crap that they read somewhere else anyway.

iSnow• 11 years ago

I am not sure if I'd classify Twitter as content, but to be less snarky, focused platforms tend to stay more on-topic than twitter. I find small subreddits to be very much on-topic, for example.

natch• 11 years ago

Just want to say, that is a really nicely written and presented article. Loved the way it had a good lead-in, clear and well explained examples with good screenshots, and how it dug into the whys and also explored the future without driving some agenda other than its main point of understanding the cruft problem. I realize the point of the article wasn't about quality of content but more about all the clutter around the content, but it bears saying, if the author is here to hear, that this was some really well done content.

flinty2• 11 years ago

The article by Ben Thompson on Stratechery is a good one to go along with this one. https://stratechery.com/2015/why-web-pages-suck/

irq-1• 11 years ago

An unmentioned alternative is Firefox "Reader View" or Readability [0], which reformat the source post-download. They don't work on all sites and can get somethings wrong. Still, its a solution that's: open, distributed and can't be easily stopped by content producers. Imagine a Firefox mode that always had Reader View on; a sort of filtered/limited web browser.

[0] https://www.readability.com/

msane• 11 years ago

What I find really silly is "would you like to subscribe to my blog?" popups which appear over top of the content after scrolling.

Let alone the browser-level modal: "Allow This Person's blog to send you push notifications?"

I've come to dislike the first 5-20 seconds after loading a news article on mobile, while ads and popups are still adjusting the position of the article text.

shostack3• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, these tend to work. I'm sure many people blindly implement them, but many have tested the results and found that they won out.

njharman• 11 years ago

That chadburn looks like it has a marble face and seems unusual. Which made me go lookup what a chadburn is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_order_telegraph

mirimir2• 11 years ago

I typically browse via nested VPN chains and Tor, and overall latency is ca. 500-1000 msec. Leaving aside my concerns about privacy and malware, ads and third-party tracking conversations simply don't work for me. My circumstances are unusual, of course. But I suspect that many who connect via geostationary satellites have similar experiences.

Too• 11 years ago

So in summary RSS is new again?

FollowSteph3• 11 years ago

I found it ironic that the author talking about web cruft also had some on their website. The header image on my cell phone in landscape mode took up 20% of my screen and stayed even if I scrolled. Anyways I thought that was pretty funny :)

beans1• 11 years ago

Why do ad blockers not hide social media links? I would love this. It is cruft I deal with every day. I have never used this feature but been forced to implement it so many times.

The Web’s Cruft Problem

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