If each KB of JS had the same win in richness as the reduction in reach, they'd be at the frontier, just at a different location. Instead, the marginal KB added by Babel/Webpack/NPM/React/etc. is *almost never* an equivalent win in richness as the reduction in reach.
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The cumulative impact is that the web reaches fewer people...and that's not a crisis for folks inside the high-performance bubble because they've got theirs.
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I got distracted by this when thinking through teams I've worked on/with which had slow DBs and servers vs. bloated frontends. Why does the former usually get fixed but not the latter?
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Answer? Slow DBs are equally slow for everyone. The server boundary is a *class solidarity boundary*.
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JS has broken the "we're all in it together" aspect of frontend.
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Replying to @slightlylate
iOS did a real number on it with 'every app is 1gb of PNG files and another 1gb of executable code' but at least you only pay most of that cost once at install time "richness" is generally sort of a plague. both probably symptoms of the same phenomenon
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Replying to @antumbral @slightlylate
I keep thinking about how dumb it was that every time they changed screen resolutions the answer was "just add another set of assets to cover that" instead of investing in supporting SVG or something like that. Then again their emoji font is like 50Mb of PNGs as well isn't it?
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Replying to @TedMielczarek @slightlylate
wasn't long before iOS that people talked up 'display postscript' and how all your UI could be scalable vectors, rasterized on-demand! to be fair, that's bad for battery life, though I'm curious whether at this point SVGs are better for people on low-spec phones than png blobs
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Replying to @antumbral @slightlylate
Did you see
@pcwalton's tiled on-GPU SVG rendering? I bet that would work pretty well. Alternately I could imagine them defining some vector format that's much simpler than SVG and also straightforward to render on GPU.1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
A vector format for mobile exists: it’s called Lottie and is getting fairly popular. Though the format is pretty awful—it’s a regression from other vector formats—and the authoring tools are reliant on After Effects :(
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There’s some *very* preliminary Lottie support in Pathfinder here, BTW: https://github.com/servo/pathfinder/tree/master/lottie … I have mobile apps in mind.
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