I tried to find a web page to link in my last story, about the recent discussion surrounding Apple’s new HTML5 demo that deliberately prevents other browsers from accessing the examples. I finally had to link my own Twitter note about the problem, because every site that wrote about the issue had too much crap in their pages.
Don’t have to take my word, just search on “apple html5 demo blocks”, and you’ll find site after web site that covers the story, true, but the story is pushed down by headers that manage to link in half a dozen ads, and multiple Google links to boot. Or, just as you finally dig out the real stuff, some stupid overlay ad or “survey” hides everything, and you have to search for the little bitty close text, just to get rid of the damned thing.
Then there’s the Twitter tweets, and the Facebook notes, and the links to this application and that application; this widget and that. Are we afraid that people will think no one likes us if our web pages aren’t full of moving, annoying bits?
I watch my browser status bar as dozens of different domains have to be looked up, just to read one or two paragraphs of text. If my ISP’s DNS server is running slow, I never get to the stories.
I’m sure someone is making money from all of this. How much money are these sites really making, though, if after minutes of nothing, I hit the stop button and return to the searches to find a site that may actually provide the story, load relatively quickly, and not exhaust my DNS server in the process.
Folks have talked about wanting native semantics in HTML5 because they don’t want to have to load the big bad JavaScript frameworks, such as jQuery. “Give us date pickers and color pickers”, they say, “Because the JavaScript is too big! It hurts the web!” What’s absolutely absurd about all of this, is that the JavaScript framework libraries are probably the only thing in any of these sites that load quickly.
What Google, Yahoo, and Bing need to start printing in search results is how many domains will have to be looked up, how much external crap will have to be loaded, if we click that link. Frankly, I would find that much more helpful than a warning that the site could potentially be a source of malware. At least malware is a straightforward attack, which is better than this killing of our time waiting on these bloated, useless sites, where every ad company in the entire world has staked a claim, leaving tiny pieces of the page for actual, useful stuff.