At work we have this timecard management system that’s an enormous pain to use. All the bottom rung employees hate it because it’s anything but intuitive. For example, it has stupid things like weekdays sorted alphabetically and a scroll bar to select the day of the month in a form. It’s like the interfaces were tested exactly one time and never visited again, so long as it works minimally.
What’s this crappy app have to do with big web pages? That application is awful for us worker bees, but management loves it because it produces nice reports. Management is the real customer for which the product is optimized. Similarly, many web pages are awful because they’re mainly rated on how it looks. Nobody is including how fast it loads in the contract, and at the product demo you bet those resources are cached in the browser.
Ask yourself: who with the money in hand is actually looking at how fast the page loads on a slow connection or low-end devices?
it has stupid things like weekdays sorted alphabetically
Holy shit, that’s stupid. Why would you even do this in the first place?! I can’t comprehend how anyone could come to the conclusion that that’s a good way to sort it.
At my current dev role I try to do optimizations to make new system area pages pretty lightweight, but it’s a bit of a struggle as I’m working with devs who have been in the same role for decades. WCAG is not prioritized, and they pull in a ton of JS libraries that usually aren’t even used. A lot of the practices I see in use are from 10 years ago, but slowly tidying up the horror show with each dev product meeting.
Admittedly could be much worse though, at least our pages aren’t 21MB large.
Ours doesn’t even try at all, because we’re largely a B2B shop and we know our customers (in the low thousands). It’s still dumb, because we could totally hire a QA or developer who has some kind of need where accessibility would be helpful, and we even have a couple of colorblind people on the team, yet we don’t prioritize anything. It’s a little disappointing, but I guess the need hasn’t arisen yet.
We build a very interactive web app with tons of data, and a fresh load is still well under 21MB (looks like ~5MB transferred over the network, ~15MB total). I don’t understand how a typical website could use more than our app when we do lots of complex stuff (2D drawing library, lots of calculations, we’re adding in 3D soon, etc).
At work we have this timecard management system that’s an enormous pain to use. All the bottom rung employees hate it because it’s anything but intuitive. For example, it has stupid things like weekdays sorted alphabetically and a scroll bar to select the day of the month in a form. It’s like the interfaces were tested exactly one time and never visited again, so long as it works minimally.
What’s this crappy app have to do with big web pages? That application is awful for us worker bees, but management loves it because it produces nice reports. Management is the real customer for which the product is optimized. Similarly, many web pages are awful because they’re mainly rated on how it looks. Nobody is including how fast it loads in the contract, and at the product demo you bet those resources are cached in the browser.
Ask yourself: who with the money in hand is actually looking at how fast the page loads on a slow connection or low-end devices?
TLDR: Looks > performance.
Holy shit, that’s stupid. Why would you even do this in the first place?! I can’t comprehend how anyone could come to the conclusion that that’s a good way to sort it.
alphabetically was probably the default sorting method for an array of data and they didn’t bother to fix it, just my guess.
Then why not use labels?
Value=“1Monday” Label=“Monday”
That’s even more work than skipping the “weekdays” array wherever the sorting happens
Friday Monday Saturday Sunday Thursday Tuesday Wednesday
In its defense, that also flows better if you’re trying to sing it.
At my current dev role I try to do optimizations to make new system area pages pretty lightweight, but it’s a bit of a struggle as I’m working with devs who have been in the same role for decades. WCAG is not prioritized, and they pull in a ton of JS libraries that usually aren’t even used. A lot of the practices I see in use are from 10 years ago, but slowly tidying up the horror show with each dev product meeting.
Admittedly could be much worse though, at least our pages aren’t 21MB large.
Ours doesn’t even try at all, because we’re largely a B2B shop and we know our customers (in the low thousands). It’s still dumb, because we could totally hire a QA or developer who has some kind of need where accessibility would be helpful, and we even have a couple of colorblind people on the team, yet we don’t prioritize anything. It’s a little disappointing, but I guess the need hasn’t arisen yet.
We build a very interactive web app with tons of data, and a fresh load is still well under 21MB (looks like ~5MB transferred over the network, ~15MB total). I don’t understand how a typical website could use more than our app when we do lots of complex stuff (2D drawing library, lots of calculations, we’re adding in 3D soon, etc).
You could probably write a browser plug-in / extension to manipulate the DOM to fix these issues.
Also yes, some people look at page load times. Our team does this. But apparently not a lot of people do this, judging by the replies in this thread.
Yeah, I’m guessing a bunch of random workers are going to do that…
A UserScript or UserStyle could fix it up.
And make some clueless Facebook addict with seventeen toolbars scream “You haCKED OUR WEBSITE?!”