Mulling over a Web Trend

I am run­ning more and more into peo­ple that per­ceive that many web sites are so heavy with Javascript that the site bogs down and bombs their web browser. It is my per­sonal belief that this is slightly skewed but it points out that many wish for sim­ple, fast sites. There are times when I wish we could go back to web 1.0 since the sites com­bined with broad­band speeds are wicked fast, a la, Craig’s List. They may be ugly, but they are fast!

Many of the sites that are com­plained about do have a lot of Javascript but Javascript is not nec­es­sar­ily caus­ing the slow speeds. Sites with well writ­ten Javascript may be a touch slower to ini­tially load but using well estab­lished frame­works such as Dojo, jQuery or Mootools a web designer can develop a very pow­er­ful and rel­a­tively fast inter­ac­tive web site, gMail being one of the orig­i­nal exam­ples. The ini­tial slower load speeds are well off­set by usabil­ity and interactivity.

What I notice is the amount of data com­ing from third party sites being dis­played on the site. Even this blog has data com­ing from three or four exter­nal sites. It is third party data streams (TPDS) that can cause all the prob­lems and exces­sive slow­ness. In some case, the web­site owner puts Javascript on their site which then pulls the TPDS. In other cases, the web site owner puts a link to the Javascript resid­ing on a third party web site which then pro­ceeds to do its thing.

Why use TPDS? First, many are rev­enue streams. For exam­ple, I have a cou­ple Amazon wid­gets on this site which helps me finan­cially when you pur­chase some­thing through them. GoogleAds are another com­mon exam­ple. Other com­mon TPDS are video streams like YouTube, RSS feeds, other types of news and weather feeds, and of course track­ing and ana­lyt­ics data streams.

TPDS all con­tribute to the time it may take a web site to load. Theoretically, it could make the site faster since you can pull from mul­ti­ple sources at the same time and they may have a lot more band­width avail­able than the orig­i­nal web­site. But in many cases, they are pulling large amounts of data that take for­ever to down­load. Worse, if that TPDS is down or really slow for some strange rea­son, it can make ones site unbear­able or even unus­able. Furthermore, the web site owner looses con­trol over what data is being dis­played or its func­tion­al­ity. The third party could change the code to do some­thing or dis­play some­thing com­pletely unex­pected by the web site owner.

Sites that are over­whelmed with TPDS are just ask­ing for trou­ble. As I already said, I use them but I am not per se happy about it. I won­der about using ser­vices such as Trumba, Disqus (which we tried for a while), and many other ser­vices that are being devel­oped which allow you to embed data into your site from their site. I won­der if they will even­tu­ally just go away because their cus­tomers, the web site own­ers, give up on using them because of speed and con­trol issues. Or are web site own­ers going to become so lazy that their site is noth­ing but TPDS and no orig­i­nal con­tent on their part. Well, it is some­thing to mull over as I develop web sites but for now, the trend isn’t going away.